Time passes quietly. Looking back, I’ve written quite a variety of content this year — so today, Master Chi wants to write an article about how to cultivate greater karmic merit (福报) for yourself.
This piece offers both guidance for your personal advancement and counsel for how you carry yourself in the world. After all, becoming a better, stronger person with fortune flowing freely — that is our greatest goal for the new year.
1 — Only fools make enemies; masters forge alliances
Even when you achieve a small measure of success, never flaunt it or show off — because that kind of behavior will quietly wound the hearts of friends who are still finding their footing. What you should do instead is maintain respect, recognition, and regard for them, and offer help within your means when the moment is right. Not only will you avoid making enemies, you’ll elevate ordinary friendships into the kind of genuine bonds you can truly depend on.
Master Chi has a particular contempt for those who, the moment they taste a little success, rush back to their old circles to boast, swagger, cut others down, and dismiss people wholesale. What they don’t realize is that they’re signing their own death warrant. No matter how strong a person is, they can’t withstand being surrounded by hidden enemies. Given enough time, weaknesses emerge — and people will exploit them without mercy. Many a nouveau riche has stumbled on exactly this point: one moment of arrogance, one act of treating others as less than human, and then an arrow comes from the shadows. They fall, and they never even know who they offended or where they went wrong.
Don’t be that fool. The road is long, and karmic merit (福缘) is your greatest asset. Respect people. Treat others well. That is the highest wisdom.
2 — Whatever you do in life, do it seriously — or don’t do it at all
Most of the true masters I know operate by a single core principle: seriousness. A relentless, total seriousness — the kind that dissolves the boundary between self and work, where time stops and the outside world ceases to exist.
Why are they this serious? Because they understand a fundamental truth: if you do something carelessly and fail, you would have been better off not doing it at all.
I live by this myself. When I write, I write. When I read, I read. When I train, I train. When I conduct a destiny reading (命理), I give it everything. Each thing is done with clarity and full commitment.
But most people just muddle through — if they fail, they fail; if it passes, it passes. What they don’t see is that this is how precious life and youth are squandered.
Why can some people quietly complete three or four life-changing accomplishments in a decade, while others stay perpetually busy yet end up with nothing to show for it? Because the former burn with singular focus, while the latter scatter their shots at random. The fates that await them are worlds apart.
3 — Don’t chase noble benefactors — pursue equality instead
The deeper someone sits at the bottom, the more deeply rooted their “wait, lean, and demand” mindset tends to be. They fantasize about a noble benefactor (贵人, Gui Ren) descending from the heavens to rescue them from their troubles — dreaming of being pulled up, getting rich overnight, and soaring to success.
So when they finally stand before someone influential, they grovel shamelessly — and they never get picked. They never understand why.
The people who actually know how to work relationships and build real networks have one instinct upon meeting anyone: What value can I bring them? What benefit? What support?
With value, benefit, and support on the table, there’s a reason to sit down and talk business. And even a powerful benefactor now has a genuine reason to pull you up.
Remember: whenever you can stand as an equal before a benefactor, never debase yourself into the role of a dog. That’s not humility — it’s self-destruction.
And if, on top of all this, you cultivate your character — if you never betray, never deceive, never forget a kindness — you’ll find that your benefactor fortune (贵人运) keeps improving. Powerful people become genuinely eager to lift you up.
4 — Since we’re not heroes, we must be shaped by our environment
The life pattern (格局) and state of mind a person ultimately reaches are determined largely by the people they’ve encountered, the circles they’ve moved in, the social tiers and places they’ve inhabited — alongside the education, culture, experience, and living examples they’ve absorbed, as well as the books, videos, and articles they’ve consumed.
So when a person lands in the right environment, they can be utterly transformed within two or three years. Conversely, the wrong environment will drain even the strongest foundations dry in the same span of time.
You are who you surround yourself with. Live among people who work hard and take things seriously, and over time you’ll become more driven and purposeful. Spend your days with people who waste themselves away, and even picking up a book will feel like an Olympian effort.
If you want to become someone, the single most important step is to spend your days alongside people who are already that someone. Actively absorb their thinking. Mirror their habits and speech. Then, gradually, you climb.
5 — What makes a great vintage is not just the ingredients — it’s time
In every industry, those who make real money and rise to the top almost all pass through the same underlying logic: grind for nine years as a nobody, reign for one year as a somebody. If you can’t endure that stretch, you don’t get to sit at the table.
As Cheng Dieyi says while training his student in Farewell My Concubine: “If you haven’t sweated three boats and five carts worth of sweat, you have no right to call yourself a performer.”
As Huo Yuanjia says to his disciples in Fearless: “This one punch holds twenty years of work. Can you block it?”
That’s why it’s almost comical to watch people enter a field, fail to make money quickly, and then loudly blame the industry or the market — blind to the fact that the problem is themselves.
The day you dare to pour one, three, five, ten years of your energy into mastering a single skill, cultivating a single field, and going deep in a single industry — that day you’ll discover that the awareness, experience, capability, resources, reputation, and connections you’ve built are compounding. And then one day, like a stone shattering the sky, you break through.
6 — Cut the junk — feed yourself quality
“High-fat, high-sugar junk” is a metaphor here. I’m talking about the endless stream of mindless short videos, mobile games, celebrity gossip, fantasy wish-fulfillment fiction, and variety shows that offer zero nourishment. The occasional indulgence is a distraction. Without portion control, it becomes a drug.
Why a drug? Because the addiction is genuinely severe.
Someone who habitually scrolls short videos, plays mobile games, and follows entertainment gossip will find it almost impossible to sit quietly and absorb a book or go deep on a skill. Their brain’s reward circuitry has been completely hijacked.
“A three-minute video gives me more pleasure than a week of reading — why would I bother with a book?”
That’s what chronic junk consumption does to you.
Many young people are its victims. They’re in their twenties and thirties — the absolute prime of their development — yet the moment they open their mouths, the emptiness inside and the shallowness of their thinking is instantly exposed. Of course they stay at the bottom. Because ignorance, superficiality, vulgarity, impulsiveness, and the craving for short-term stimulation are the classic markings of a poverty mindset — and once that imprint is set, it is very difficult to undo.
The best approach is to keep your distance from the start. The people who build these short-video apps and social platforms never get addicted to their own products — just as drug dealers don’t use. Treat this content with the same wariness.
7 — One level of awareness, one kind of life
A person’s level of awareness (认知) is of supreme importance, because it directly determines every major decision, every direction of effort, every approach to situations, and every line of reasoning across their entire life. So if someone’s awareness is low and undeveloped, that person is, in all practical terms, finished.
Two examples to make this concrete:
The classic case of broken female awareness: a woman of thoroughly ordinary looks, with no social intelligence and no capacity for self-reflection, who still expects a tall, handsome man to appear — romantic, wealthy, and devoted to treating her like a princess. Women like this typically fail in both career and marriage, eventually becoming emotionally shattered and left behind.
The classic case of broken male awareness: a man well into his thirties who still does nothing but game and watch anime, emotionally unstable, with no long-term goals or corresponding ambition — yet who privately believes he’s a hidden genius just waiting for his moment. Men like this are destined to become bitter and envious, resentful of everyone else’s success.
What they share is the complete absence of a sound, rigorous internal logic for building a good life. No coherent awareness whatsoever. This is the most dangerous and incurable condition. They leech off parents above, drag down children below, and along the way destroy their partner’s life entirely.
8 — The social arena is a web: you’re in me, and I’m in you
The vast majority of those who fail — you’ll notice — tend to be the stay-at-home type: people living the monotonous home-office-home existence, day in and day out.
They’ll tell you the people around them have nothing to offer, so they’d rather stay home and figure it all out alone. This is bewildering.
Without a circle, you’re disconnected from the world. You have no access to timely, real, valuable information. And without that, how could you ever find an opportunity to change your life?
You have to keep meeting people from all walks of life. Keep expanding your network. Continuously filter out the weak connections and refresh your roster of meaningful ones. That’s how opportunities reveal themselves.
Throughout this process, you also need to learn to demonstrate your own capabilities, value, and resources — make yourself someone others want to call on. At the same time, let others help you.
That’s how a circle starts to function. It snowballs as you stay active within it, and the returns grow with it.
Look at the central figures in any city’s social web. Not a single one of them is timid or fragile. Every one of them is a skilled, thick-skinned connector — someone who loves to help and isn’t afraid to ask for help in return.
Calling on people, being called upon — that constant exchange of favors is the secret to a continuously growing resource base.
9 — The grateful are blessed; the resentful suffer
For the final point in today’s article, Master Chi wants to share one more observation of particular value.
Have you noticed that virtually all the successful businesspeople, artists, and influential figures today never let a foul or negative word cross their lips? When they speak, every word is auspicious — full of dignity, warmth, and good fortune. Gratitude flows from everything they say.
Why?
Because someone who genuinely practices gratitude simply feels good to be around. Even if there was once friction or conflict, over time former adversaries soften, become allies, and offer what help they can in small ways — or at minimum, stop working against them.
And the grateful don’t just speak it — they back it up with action. Real thanks, expressed through deeds. So naturally, people want to work with them, and they make sure to bring the best opportunities and resources to that person first.
From a destiny reading (命理) perspective, this is the most intelligent form of cultivating karmic merit — planting seeds of good fortune in everyone around you, ensuring that people leave each interaction feeling better than before.
The chronic complainer, on the other hand, is essentially cut off from good fortune. You know the type — every word out of their mouth is gloom, shadow, resentment, or grievance. Of course no one wants to spend time with them. Nobody willingly walks alongside a bad omen.
Worse, their deep-seated belief is that in any collaboration, they’re the one being exploited and shortchanged. So they never share generously — which pushes away every good intention that comes their way, and causes people to actively distance themselves from this concentrated source of negative energy.
In all my years of reading people’s destiny charts, and in personally guiding many people through their difficulties step by step, the ones who command my deepest admiration are those who carry genuine gratitude in their hearts. Among all those people, I have yet to meet one who stayed stuck in hardship for long.