I despise frugality — it has always been the pitiful habit of the impoverished and small-minded. So today, Master Chi wants to share with you one simple, unvarnished truth: extravagance and luxury are by no means the only or ultimate theme of life. But deliberate poverty and frugality are absolutely the finest weapons for destroying and grinding down a person’s spirit. Because excess makes people restless — and restlessness eventually settles into calm. Only poverty deflates the soul, and a deflated soul curdles into inferiority and gloom, from which there is no easy cure.
So when you are nobody and have accomplished nothing, material indulgence is precisely the best bait to “seduce” you into striving forward. Never listen to the penny-pinching wisdom of the stingy and small.
Have you ever seen a titan of industry who was stingy? Have you ever seen a dynasty of wealth built on thrift? Don’t buy into the masses’ philosophy of wealth either — if you still need a “philosophy of wealth,” that only proves you still see the mountain as a mountain, or can’t even see the mountain at all. Master Chi’s goal is to teach you how to manage wealth — and ultimately to play with wealth. That is seeing water as water: water has no fixed form.
Of course, if you feel you already have the understanding, read the following lines — and if they land, go about your business:
Those who scatter gold like dust dine with great minds — a thousand gold coins spent will return a thousandfold. Those who clutch gold like life itself dwell among the mediocre — when the mountains run dry and the rivers run out, there is no road forward.
If you feel you want to go further still, spend some time absorbing this piece. Trust me — by the end, you will understand that gold mountains and silver seas follow those who know how to walk with wealth.
Recently, my cousin decided to give her daughter a gift to celebrate landing an internship at Morgan Stanley right after graduation. The gift, however, was far from straightforward — it was a multiple-choice question:
Option 1: Two LV seasonal limited-edition commuter bags. Value: over sixty thousand yuan.
Option 2: My cousin would use her connections to reserve a Hermès 25 Black Gold Kelly, but her daughter would need to pay for the mandatory companion purchases herself. Value: over one hundred thousand yuan.
After weighing both options, the niece chose Option 2 — the same logic young men entering the world cling to when they want “one move that solves everything.” For a young woman just starting out, carrying a Kelly as a daily commuter bag is a kind of small, quiet invincibility, at least for a while.
Of course, the companion purchase costs still stung. Wasn’t this supposed to be a gift? How did she end up having to chip in tens of thousands of her own money?
Before I continue, pause here. Think about why Master Chi’s cousin would pose such a difficult question to her own child — after all, a Kelly is hardly a stretch for her.
Now, having thought about it, Master Chi wants to share a plain, honest truth: the vast majority of people in this world are, when all is said and done, ordinary people — including you and me.
This means we are almost never going to wake up one morning with a sudden enlightenment, step across a threshold, and enter a whole new plane of existence. That kind of profound awakening belongs to those whose destiny chart carries a monk-and-priest configuration — it is a gift one encounters by grace among ordinary people, not something that can be sought.
The best way to keep a young person just entering society motivated? Give them a luxury gift — and make it the genuine opening act of their life.
“This bag, worth eighty thousand yuan, is your starting point. From here on, the only direction is up — never down. Don’t tell me you don’t care about material things. You don’t have to spend lavishly, but you cannot afford not to possess. Even men of letters have looked down on money — take Zhou Shuren (Lu Xun): on 350 silver dollars a year, he bought a Beijing courtyard house. Even masters of the opera valued art over money — Mei Lanfang charged 200 silver dollars per performance; twenty performances bought a grand estate. And what of monks? Loss-making listed companies are everywhere, yet show me a temple that runs at a loss. The great incense-burning temples of the land are all gilded and magnificent, ablaze with splendor. So if you want to be above money, first accumulate great wealth — it is easy to pick up and hard to put down. You haven’t even picked it up yet. How can you talk about letting go?”
For the vast majority of ordinary people in this world, painting them grand and noble life goals means absolutely nothing. What they love above all else is to nest comfortably in their own comfort zone and sink happily into mediocrity. This is why your child finds gaming and binge-watching reality shows entertaining; why your husband finds bragging at the dinner table satisfying; why your wife finds gossiping with other parents genuinely pleasurable.
In plain terms, it comes down to limited exposure. Because they have never encountered anything truly fine, they let themselves be drained by the cheap entertainment that lies everywhere at hand.
This is precisely the shared failure of so many families from modest backgrounds. Not only do they not know how to deploy money to generate more wealth in the realm of investment — they also don’t know how to use money to actually build a real future for their children.
The only thing they know is to pour everything into tutoring classes. Then, when the child grows up, they chip in toward a down payment on an apartment, dust off their hands, and consider the job done.
And the result? The child has sat through an endless catalogue of meaningless courses, having wasted precisely the years most crucial for expanding their worldview in a room of a few dozen square meters. They emerge as a hollow, obedient test-taking machine — and then proceed to repeat this same foolish pattern on the next generation.
As Master Chi has always said: “I don’t believe in bloodline theory, but I believe in inheritance theory. What separates wolves from sheep is not the wealth and power each species wields — it is the way of life each absorbs from birth.”
So let me share what some would call a “heresy.” Whether you agree or not, you are an adult — judge for yourself.
If you come from a modest background, skip the pointless tutoring fees entirely. Take your children to parks, to art exhibitions, to performances of all kinds, to travel near and far — it doesn’t need to be lavish. (If a family cannot even squeeze out the time and money for the above, stop pushing the children. Push yourselves. The career problems facing the two parents right now are far more urgent than the children’s development.)
Then, when your child turns twenty, buy your daughter a luxury bag that can double as a daily commuter; buy your son a prestigious watch that is understated rather than flashy. Then tell them: “Your father and I saved carefully for a long time to buy this. We give it to you now as your coming-of-age gift. We did everything we could.”
Trust me — in that moment, your child will see clearly what they could never see before, as if a blockage had been cleared overnight. They will grow up in a single night.
They will feel joy at receiving the gift, of course. But the object will stir something deeper. They will reflect: so my parents are just ordinary people; this careful, hard-won gesture is truly all they could offer. They will understand: so I am ordinary too, and all that youthful fire and bravado means nothing in a world where everything is transactional. They will realize: my parents are so limited. I myself am so limited. It is time to grow up. This — this is the life I want.
One lesson like this is worth ten thousand words.
Yes. Rather than letting your child be swept away by the glitter of the material world, it is better to personally give them an inoculation for the mind.
Never trust the so-called “experts” who tell you how children should be raised this way or that way. For children, parents come in only three grades: zero, sixty, and one hundred. No middle ground.
Zero-point parents don’t need elaborating — they abandon their children entirely. They are less than human.
Sixty-point parents pour their hearts and souls into their children, from birth through adulthood, with meticulous care. But they are only caregivers. No matter how much effort they invest, they remain caregivers.
One-hundred-point parents are beacons. It doesn’t matter how far that beacon shines or how long it burns. Regardless of whether they themselves are high or low in this world’s hierarchy, as long as they have once played the role of guide, they are one hundred points.
These beacon parents may not be tremendously successful themselves. But at minimum, they exhaust themselves so that their children, standing on their shoulders, can glimpse a broader world beyond. Even if they cannot send their children into that broader world — even if the child only sees it — that child has a chance to be transformed.
Because having seen it, they are drawn toward it. Because they are drawn toward it, they cannot forget it. Because they cannot forget it, something will eventually answer.
What is laughable, lamentable, and maddening is that our traditional culture has long been built on the principle of “extinguishing human desire” — and many foolish parents have taken this as sacred gospel.
Think for a moment: how can a child not want to play? How can a young person have no physical desires? How can a young adult have no material preferences? Which grown adult is truly immune to these things? If adults cannot restrain themselves from these pleasures, how can you expect an immature child to suppress them? And besides, these things are not base — they are literally the foundations of joy in life. You don’t want to be a moralist who eradicates them. You want to guide and channel them correctly.
This is why people sometimes ask: “Master Chi, how do you read a child’s future so accurately?” Because I don’t even need to look at their BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny). I just look at the expression on a child’s face, and I know whether they have a future. The method is almost embarrassingly simple — anyone can learn it.
If a fourteen or fifteen-year-old is already wearing the suppressed look of a rote-learning education system, and on top of that is eerily, unnervingly obedient — (does that not sound like a description of a sheep?) — that is the classic physiognomy of mediocrity. No matter how good the raw material, it is wasted. Truly. If your child is like this, please don’t bring them to me for a destiny reading. Save my time. Save your money.
Some time ago, a group of us sat down for a meal and the topic of children’s education came up. Among the parents at the table, there was no shortage of views on academics — which country is better for study abroad, England, America, or Canada; which connections to use to get into which school; whether to go into investment banking, consulting, brokerage, or the civil service after graduation; how to build credentials and pave the path.
But the one point on which every single one of us was in total, absolute, unequivocal agreement — note, I use “absolute” three times deliberately — was this: when our children study abroad, they must spend freely and generously.
Sports cars? Buy them. Luxury watches? Buy them. Designer bags? Buy them. Cash? Give it.
Of course, this all rests on a foundation: academic results must be solid, and every winter and summer break must include internships and real-world experience. Because while you want your children to taste the pleasure of spending money, you also want them to feel the hardship of earning it. Hold both at once, and they will see through to the true nature of the money world.
And there is another key element: teaching your child how to use money.
Yes — “using money” is always a skill. More than that, it is an art. An art that children from modest backgrounds can never imagine or access in their lifetimes.
Because when you rise above others, you may not yet know how to earn — but you will certainly learn first how to spend and distribute wealth.
You often see people complaining that their boss or manager doesn’t treat them fairly, or that they always do the most work and take home the smallest share. The honest truth is: they are either not capable enough, haven’t found the right person to follow, or the person they’re following is just a small player themselves.
Because “big bosses,” “godfathers,” “tycoons” — these titles carry an innate Chi field that utterly surpasses what a salaried worker can conceive of, and they are not something modest upbringings can produce.
A white-collar worker earning seven or eight thousand a month is barely scraping by on rent — where would they find the bandwidth to master this art? This particular instinct can only emerge from a street-born genius or a scion of a great house.
And only with that kind of foundation beneath you can you — while those from modest backgrounds are penny-pinching and trembling with anxiety over small gains — simply produce a number that silences them entirely.
I pay you to do the work. You are the errand runner. The one who commands and the one who executes — that is the difference between eating the meat and gnawing the bone. Who leads the pack and who follows is drawn clearly from that moment, never to be reversed.
So even though many parents from modest backgrounds look down on wealthy children’s spending habits, take pleasure in imagining their downfall, and fancy themselves authorities on child-rearing — they have no idea that the “universal wisdom” they preach is precisely the chain around their own children’s necks.
The greatest irony for these frugal households is that the second-generation collapse they hope for almost never materializes. When it does, it makes national news and becomes a national joke. Meanwhile, the children of modest homes who amount to nothing is nearly a foregone conclusion.
Because the moment both sets of children enter the real world, the gap accelerates at extraordinary speed. And these parents can never figure out why.
They cannot comprehend that this is no longer a matter of differing horizons — it is a gap at the level of cognition itself.
They keep thinking: “I raised my child to have proper values. How is it that they still look so lost and timid?”
The truth is: the more “universal” a set of values, the more mediocre those who follow them. These values are designed to domesticate flocks. Do not let yourself be brainwashed by the “universal values of the underclass.” Those who believe in them remain mediocre — forever without accomplishment.
Instead, remember: many things simply cannot be reasoned with. The most typical example — no matter how many times you lecture about principles, human desire remains naked and alive and refuses to be extinguished. Principles come and go through the ages; desire alone endures.
Suppression never works as well as channeling. How you direct desire determines whether you spend your life as a grass-eating sheep.
Think about the wealthy second generation: a young man who drives a Ferrari in college — do you think he will be satisfied with a BMW or Mercedes after graduation? Let alone those standard-issue cars priced at three to five hundred thousand.
There is nothing wrong with loving material things. The key is to always have the means to sustain that standard of living. This is something most ordinary people fail to grasp — simply because they have never had substantial gold pass through their hands, they cannot understand how to ride the roaring, blazing current of human ambition.
Once, at a dinner, a young secretary at a friend’s company asked: “Why aren’t you worried when your children go to nightclubs?”
Let me turn it around: I am far more worried about children who are addicted to video games day and night.
People always grow tired of things. Whether it is nightclubs and sports cars, or gaming and reality TV — sooner or later the novelty fades. So ask yourself: when both children wake up and decide to engage with the world, will their realities still be the same?
Go further: those young lords who have driven luxury cars for years will eventually tire of luxury cars and move into the realm of finance or higher games. Those young ladies who have accumulated wardrobes of top-tier bags will eventually tire of luxury goods and shift into building their social networks.
When all the glamour settles and the dust clears, these former players will move on to higher-level games, leaving the dream of luxury to those from modest backgrounds who have never tasted it.
Don’t bother overthinking it. Those who are still racing sports cars today are, by definition, not in the top tier. Truly.
The most terrifying thing in this world is not the wealth gap. It is a gap so wide that you have no imagination for it — no channel through which you could ever learn what that circle of people is actually playing.
Not long ago, a group of self-made billionaires in Beijing started collecting antiques — supposedly flawless pieces from the Song dynasty Ru kilns. The whole scene was a lively spectacle: waves of so-called experts came and went, the debate over authenticity was deafening enough to lift the roof.
Later, Master Chi accompanied a genuine old-world Beijing collector to have a look. The man didn’t even flinch — he simply said: “Fake. Different from the pair I have at home.”
Case closed. He had spent his early years roaming the world, gone south in his prime, and his pedigree was as pure as they come. There was nothing left to argue.
But I’ve wandered off-topic.
The point is: the fear is not that others win at the starting line. The fear is that while you are still preparing your child for that starting line — buying running shoes, drilling for speed — the other child has already gotten onto a yacht and blasted past at 250 kilometers per hour, on an entirely different course.
They are not even on the same track as your child. They leave their lane to you the way someone lists a used luxury car for sale — just enough to recover the gas money, barely worth a second glance. And even then, most people still cannot afford the used luxury car.
Because Master Chi has also been young, reckless, and unbridled, I know all too well how this world works. And this truth cannot be captured in ink, cannot be articulated in principles — it can only be understood by entering the arena yourself and walking the path.
So rather than reading the formulaic essays written by young editors who have yet to amount to anything, simply commit to one thing above all else: moving upward. That is what matters most.
If you, reading this right now, are an ordinary person without particular skills or advantages — then provided you have no crippling debt or crushing financial pressure — start, in small and considered ways, to allow yourself some luxuries.
Yes, we all know these are manufactured desires conjured by unscrupulous brand marketers. Yes, we all know these things offer no practical benefit to your life.
But what I want is for you to rekindle your longing for a better future. To taste, even if just the scraps and leftovers, of this glittering world.
Because no matter how you slice it — meat, even the bits left on the bone, always beats plain greens.
Doesn’t it?
End of article — reproduction without permission is prohibited.
— Master Chi, August 5, 2019