Why have I always worked so hard to share all kinds of knowledge with my brothers and sisters? Because knowledge is everything.
There is a classic question in the Talmud — the cultural backbone and treasury of wisdom for the Jewish people: if a great fire burns down your home and you can only retrieve one thing from the ruins, what would you choose? The answer Jewish parents teach their children is: knowledge. Because as long as you have knowledge, you can rebuild countless homes.
It’s like the line from the movie 1942, where the landlord played by Zhang Guoli says, as he flees the famine with nothing: “Just let me make it to Shaanxi alive — in ten years, I’ll be a landlord again.” What does he rely on? Knowledge. Real, substantive knowledge — the kind that can build your entire wealth edifice from the ground up.
Knowledge like how to navigate the human dynamics of climbing the career ladder — and then how to actually execute on the ground, getting things done beautifully in a way everyone walks away satisfied.
Knowledge like understanding the underlying logic of the great casino — who wields the sickle and who is the leek, when to lie low and when to go all in.
The tragedy is that none of this knowledge is taught in school. You could search every library and never find a single book that walks you through how to genuinely create wealth, how to truly rise above in society, or how to make sure your hard work isn’t wasted. Not one book.
It’s just like the stock market plunge these past few days. Those who don’t understand will never understand — but those who do can cut straight to the heart of it: our great casino completes one major harvest roughly every seven years. That’s because seven years is approximately the interval needed for a “cleansing” cycle. Same principle as draining a large swimming pool every so often to scrub the bottom clean.
Cleanse what? You know, and I know.
So if you look back at the articles I’ve written this past month — every time I mentioned the great casino, I said the same thing: “Put in only money you can afford to lose, experience the ride, don’t expect returns — the experience and the lesson are what matter.” Why? Because something felt off. Something, I could sense, was coming.
It wasn’t intelligence that got me there — intelligence played only a small part. What it relied on was knowledge. Knowing what was likely to happen next. Seeing the path that leads away from danger and toward fortune.
From the perspective of one’s destiny: if your knowledge delivers two major turning points in your life, you can complete a full class ascension — giving yourself and your family a material life far beyond what you have now. Three such moments means jumping two tiers. Four means three tiers. Three tiers is enough to lift someone from abject poverty to a local man of substantial wealth and means.
But this knowledge — which cannot be obtained in a classroom, cannot be found in a book — where can you get it? I believe there are only three shortcuts:
1 — Read vast amounts of history and economics, then distill, distill, distill.
As I said above, books themselves won’t teach you anything directly. All you see are black characters on white pages. They’re like dark ore: to extract the gold, you must refine it. How do you refine it? Trace the cause and effect through careful thinking; apply what you’ve learned to new situations through reflection. You’ll discover that across five thousand years of human history, the events that have already happened are simply repeating themselves in new costumes, endlessly.
This moment is exactly like that moment.
2 — Through your own bloody failures, keep extracting real, hard-won knowledge.
Some people are simply born different — not natural readers, yet with remarkable resilience and extraordinary intuition. On their journey through life, though they experience failure, the pain cuts so deep that each time they emerge stronger and more mature. Why do so many first-generation wealthy people become stubborn and domineering as they enter middle and old age? Because they carry a body of knowledge that is entirely their own — wealth they traded their youth and fate to heaven for. But the price is immense. Simply surviving it is not easy. Like the eagle that destroys its own beak and talons to be reborn — it may gain new life, but the pain goes straight to the bone.
3 — Seek learning from high achievers who have already gotten results.
A high achiever is, for the vast majority of people, the greatest noble benefactor (Gui Ren) of their lifetime. You don’t need them to give you actual promotions or tangible assistance. Simply having them share their knowledge with you is already an immense gift.
A few words from an elder who has navigated a successful career can clear your mind in an instant. A short conversation with a wealthy predecessor can hit you like a revelation.
There’s a saying: a single conversation with a wise person is worth ten years of reading. A few well-placed words that clarify the critical steps in building your wealth edifice — that distilled knowledge can save you from walking ten-plus years of wrong roads in this lifetime.
These three paths are the only three ways a person can acquire real, life-changing knowledge.
The path has been pointed out for you. How to pursue it is up to you.
Especially when you find yourself in hardship during the coming era of downturn — please don’t ever say no one warned you about the path to knowledge, and that you had no idea how to climb back out once you fell.
Today’s article cuts through the complexity. Everything that needs to be said has been said.
So please, don’t be afraid. Even if one day you find yourself with nothing — as long as you carry knowledge in your heart, you have a card to play, you have direction, and you have a real chance to turn things around.
It’s late. Wishing every one of my brothers and sisters: peace, smooth sailing, and an abundance of knowledge.