One day, when you’ve reached the social standing I occupy, you’ll understand one thing clearly.
The core of Chinese society has always been: “everything depends on the noble person’s ceaseless self-improvement.” This holds true at every level of society — no exceptions.
No matter how favorable your background, birth, talent, fortune, or destiny chart (命盘), you still need to maintain a relentlessly positive spirit. Only then will you be capable of actually receiving everything those advantages have to offer.
Yes, this era may not be the best of times — but it’s far from the worst. Look across five thousand years of Chinese history: moments more comfortable than today are vanishingly rare.
More importantly, we still live in relative peace and prosperity, and social class hasn’t yet fully solidified. There are still opportunities to turn things around through intelligence and strategy.
So my sincere hope for you is this: whether or not you have any sense of your own destiny chart, build the habit of planning for the future.
Those who master life always lay out the terrain before they make their moves — in matters large and small alike.
For example, at every turn, ask yourself: What are the core objectives I absolutely must accomplish this year? What deep, lasting benefits will achieving those objectives bring me? And specifically, how am I going to make it happen?
Your goals don’t need to be sky-high. Realistic is fine. Then pursue them with everything you have.
Do this consistently, and when you look back at year’s end, you’ll find something remarkable: the same twelve months passed for everyone — but while others drifted through the year in a fog, you used it fully.
Repeat this cycle, and you’ll watch yourself complete one solid, tangible leap forward every three years.
The danger is this: you listen to certain people’s sighing and lamenting, and you join them in choosing years of meaningless idleness. Then when the next cycle of opportunity arrives, you watch golden chances slip away right before your eyes.
Your mental state collapses. You tell yourself: “I can’t catch up anyway — I might as well give up completely.”
And so life gets progressively worse. Someone who genuinely had what it took to make something of themselves ends up grinding themselves down to nothing.
Beyond planning, I also hope you carry a sunny, vital spirit at all times.
Never fall into excessive self-doubt. Never succumb to arrogance or complacency. Face life with an open, grounded calm — learn to identify problems slowly, and dissolve them quietly.
Don’t let difficulties and obstacles trigger fear, then scramble to find excuses to quit.
Things like: “My family never taught me this,” “I’ve never learned how,” “I definitely can’t do it”…
Remember: almost everything in this world looks impossible from the outside.
But once you engage it head-on with full commitment, you discover it’s a paper tiger — something that can be handled and resolved.
And even if you’re facing a real tiger? Hold your ground first. Stay composed. You’ll find that even real tigers have solutions — it just takes someone determined enough to find them.
I also know there’s a cloud of low spirits hovering over you lately. That’s alright — it actually speaks to your perceptiveness and capacity for foresight.
I’d like to recommend a text by the Qing dynasty statesman Zeng Guofan (曾国藩): the Ting Jing (挺經, “Classic of Perseverance”). It’s exceptional.
Its core message: “Even when you’ve been driven to the edge, don’t give up lightly. Hold on, endure — and when enough time passes, a turning point will naturally emerge.”
That sunny, expansive spirit — cultivate it deliberately, right now.
Of course, I know you still carry some questions about the bigger direction. Let me offer a simple summary as a closing thought:
1. There’s still some enduring to do — that’s fine. Think of it as weathering a long summer. Just hold your position steadily within life’s larger layout.
2. What’s happening right now is actually a slow process of pressure releasing. Once it fully releases, what comes next will be remarkably beautiful.
3. Smart people must learn to see the hidden undercurrents beneath the noisy stage. The performance on the stage doesn’t matter — it’s what runs beneath it. Do you understand?
4. The destiny trajectories of many people will be permanently set during the brief window of opportunity ahead.
Those who make the right choices — the returns within this two-to-three-year window can bless their families for generations. Those who get it wrong will have generations paying the price for a missed opportunity.
5. If you’re surrounded long-term by a group of positive, optimistic people who push upward even in adversity — then striving forward will feel like the most natural thing in the world.
This is precisely why readers within my community generally upgrade both their worldview and their wealth capacity roughly every two years.
The reason is simple: who you’re with determines what information you absorb. Over time, you become the kind of person shaped by that information.
Those who stay near vermillion are stained red; those who stay near ink are stained black. This has been true since ancient times, and it never changes.
Equally: those who stay near the prosperous — naturally become prosperous themselves.