A few days ago, I accepted a friend’s invitation to visit the new establishment he had just opened in the Jiangnan region. Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that while I tend to carry myself with a certain composed air in public — yes, I do enjoy putting on airs — it is entirely deliberate. Life passes in but a few seasons, and whether you are riding high or weathering a storm, taking pleasure quietly and enjoying yourself with restraint is not only appropriate but necessary. This becomes especially clear once you have accumulated a certain degree of wealth: you begin to understand that this is simply what life is.
So while I personally do not drink, I do enjoy getting together with my circle of friends for some lively company. Since this was a grand opening — an auspicious occasion — when my friend extended the invitation, I went.
One should understand that establishments of genuine taste and refinement have always consumed money far faster than the more… visceral sort of places. Add a host determined to show full generosity, and the bill for a single evening ran seven figures. No complaints — that is a proper show of face.
What can I say — even in a sluggish economic climate, whether in Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangdong, any venue worth its reputation will see six-figure evenings without breaking a sweat. A full private booking? The number only goes up from there.
But this is not what I want to explore with you today. What I want to share is the feeling that washed over me after the evening ended — standing on the street, waiting for my driver to bring the car around.
Yes — imagine it yourself: one moment you are inside a gilded private room where a single night costs seven figures; the next, you are standing alone in the quiet heart of the city at midnight, waiting. And then you notice them — young people still out on the streets at that hour, selling their muscle, pouring their youthful energy into work that will never make them rich.
You cannot help but feel a pang of something. Because you know, with absolute certainty: their toil will buy them food and shelter. It will never make them wealthy. And the knowledge they have inherited from their elders — everything they have been taught — will never free them from the tier they were born into.
The shortcuts to wealth are rarely carved out alone. Almost universally, someone has to pull you onto the path, give you a hand up, and walk you through the door. Without that moment of connection, the vast majority of people — 99.9999% of ordinary people — will never set foot inside the wealth circle their entire lives.
As for great wealth? Let us not even go there. The kind of wealth that takes time just to count the digits — that is absolutely impossible to achieve through individual effort alone. You must be brought in. Brought into the circle where wealth, power, and reputation interweave and reinforce one another. Once you are inside, opportunities that once seemed impossibly out of reach — and wealth that moves with effortless gravity — become resources you can simply reach out and take.
These circles, in my observation, exist in virtually every city with a population exceeding ten million. In each such city, there are at minimum a dozen or more circles of varying scale, spread across every industry, each creating and controlling astonishing wealth and influence.
The problem, for most people, is that obtaining the golden key to these circles feels like an impossible task. And this kind of knowledge cannot be found among ordinary people — for good reason. A carp cannot learn how to leap the dragon gate from cows, pigs, and sheep, even though those animals have always been enthusiastic about pooling their collective wisdom into schemes that go nowhere.
Here is the truth: if you want to leap the dragon gate, there are only two things you need to master.
“Knowing how to conduct yourself” and “following the right people.”
When we move through the world, we can always spot certain types — people who seem to maintain decent small businesses and steady, respectable cash flow, yet never rise to any greater height. Intelligent? Absolutely. Professional? Without question. And yet they never become truly great.
Many small merchants who never cross the threshold of a hundred million in lifetime net worth are perfect examples. Their business can be as good as it gets, but it cannot compensate for standing alone. And here is the thing about people — we are all greedy and full of desire. When wealth accumulates to a certain point, the temptation to venture into unfamiliar territory becomes irresistible. Finance and investment are almost always the trap.
The common belief is that finance and investment are about expertise — that intelligence and skill are sufficient. This is naive. In finance, there are only two ways to make money: you either take it from others, or you collect a toll on the road. If you are neither of these, you are the loser. How could any small merchant possibly position themselves as either? They cannot. The result is that the wealthier they become, the more they resemble a plump, tender little lamb — and a lamb built on honest industry has no chance against capital wolves who have been feasting on blood their entire lives.
The moment they step outside their own domain, failure comes for them again and again, in waves of significant losses. The root cause is simple: no backing, no foundation to lean on. Set aside everything else — the natural laws of commerce alone are enough to pick them clean.
I trust that after reading so many of my pieces, you can grasp what I am pointing at.
When you truly possess wealth in the hundreds of millions, or a business generating tens of millions in annual profit, you will understand what it means that “wealth follows the person who drives it.” Simply put: whether wealth and a business can endure long-term has nothing to do with the numbers on a balance sheet. It has everything to do with the capability and power of the person steering it. Without that, even a billion-dollar fortune can be burned to nothing in the blink of an eye when trouble comes.
So how do you break out of this constraint?
Be humble. Admit your inexperience. Go pay your respects at the right doors. Find the genuine leaders — the true dragon heads — and ask them to bring you into the game.
Here is the reality: what they possess is not merely wealth. Wealth has always been an extension of power. Their decisive advantage is an absolute win rate within their domain. I will not go into all the details here, but the underlying logic should be clear enough.
Now let us bring the conversation down to a more grounded level. For the many ordinary readers out there — if you want to rise, what should you do?
I have said this countless times: if you want to flourish within a circle, your most important task is absolutely not to strategize based on the cards you currently hold. The odds are strong that your talents, advantages, and gifts are simply not suited to your present situation. And most people’s knowledge, capabilities, and worldview — accumulated from childhood to adulthood — are largely without real value and built on flawed foundations.
So the move is to discard your existing logic and assumptions entirely, then unconditionally adapt to what the environment demands. Learn it. Absorb it. Slowly make it yours.
At this point, many people will object: does that mean abandoning your conscience and values? What about truth, goodness, and beauty?
Let me be direct. Right now you are a person of little weight and no influence. Even if you were burning with righteous passion, I do not see that passion producing any meaningful results in your professional life. And if you genuinely want to make a grand impact and change things — then climb to a position where you actually have the power to make decisions. Once you have real authority, will it not be far easier to correct injustice and wrongdoing? This is what it means: to do good, a good person must sometimes be more ruthless than a bad one.
To return to the point: once you have adapted to your environment, there is really only one thing left to do. Find the person worth following and leaning on. This is what “following the right people” means.
But note — the true meaning of this is not to become someone’s permanent subordinate and appendage. That path ties your entire future to theirs. If they live an ordinary life, you will never have your day either. And remember: people are petty creatures. The moment someone senses that you always come to them with hat in hand, there is a ninety percent chance they will climb on top of you and make themselves comfortable. Do not blame them — you lowered your own head first. Who would not sit down?
So the “people” I am referring to are not fixed — they constantly change. Within any given circle, some people have deeper connections further up the chain; some have access and privileges that can benefit you; some are fellow climbers, just like you. All of these people are cards in your hand. Your task is to identify what each of them needs and link those needs together — attempt it, help make it happen, again and again.
This is also what I mean by “knowing how to conduct yourself.”
Now, some will say: what if I go to all this trouble and end up doing the work for someone else’s benefit?
That thinking is the classic small-farmer mentality.
The “I must profit from this” mindset is genuinely dangerous. It signals to everyone around you that dealing with you carries risk — that you will extract something from every interaction. The biggest damage from always plucking feathers off every passing goose is not what you take; it is that your reputation is destroyed. And once that is gone, you can never again leverage the greatest force multiplier available to any human being: other people.
So when opportunities arise to help, to connect, to bridge — put in the effort. Introduce people. Do not fixate on immediate returns. I have seen countless real examples where small favors and casual gestures of goodwill eventually wove together into a vast network of human trust — and then, in one decisive push, catapulted someone to a remarkable height.
Do not underestimate this approach. For those who start from nothing, this is the fastest path into the major circles. Because you will have assembled genuine resources through your network — and in this world, nobody cares whether the resources are technically yours. What matters is whether you can mobilize them. More importantly, you will have built your own reputation. For the son or daughter of ordinary means, reputation is your second set of connections, your second source of backing. Because earning the recognition of those around you is the surest way to earn a nod from the people who matter.
And at the end of the day, the people who move in top-tier circles today are not villains or schemers. When everyone is worth several hundred million, the gap in raw intelligence between any two of them is not so vast. Do not fool yourself into thinking what I have described sounds easy. I assure you — it is extraordinarily difficult. In terms of life pattern (格局), only those rare individuals of the highest character can sustain this approach from beginning to end.
I am not asking for much. Give yourself five years. Internalize this way of thinking into your bones, and then go out and apply it among people with everything you have.
Remember what Master Chi said today:
“If great fortune has not yet arrived for you, gather the fortune of many to build your foundation.”