First, a declaration upfront: this article went through three consecutive revisions before it was finally published.
As the title says, I cannot guarantee how long this article will survive — so read it while you can, and treasure it.
I also hope that as you read this, you find a way to save it, and take note of the core ideas within it.
I understand why obstacles keep appearing. Because real truth has a way of threatening certain interests — especially when it clarifies the path forward for ordinary people.
So every word in this repeatedly-refined article carries hidden meaning. Many paragraphs require you to read them carefully, more than once, before the deeper layer reveals itself.
The ideal reader for this article is clear: First, those who want their own generation’s efforts to change the trajectory of their family line. Second, those who want to build foundational financial freedom through hard work and accumulation. Third, those who refuse to grind away a lifetime in misery, and want to genuinely open up their lives.
The following are all core distillations. I hope you absorb them seriously.
1 — Master Chi’s most fundamental advice: you must “understand the current era’s structure and adjust your development mindset accordingly.”
Understanding the current era’s structure means I want you to grasp this: we now live in an environment where social hierarchies are highly stable.
Highly stable social structures mean exactly this: every good position and good opportunity you can see with your own eyes already has a 99.99% chance of having a designated candidate lined up behind it. The odds of it falling to you are nearly zero.
So please abandon the old thinking that says, “If I just work hard, keep my head down, and wait my turn, I’ll eventually rise.” That is absolutely impossible now.
On the other side, there’s also no reason to believe anyone who tells you, “The real good days are still ahead — just hang in there a little longer.” That’s a story you should stop buying.
The objective reality is this: if you don’t actively adjust your “life development mindset,” your future will most likely mean decades of scraping by on the cheapest possible wages.
But here’s the optimistic side: the moment you’re willing to invest real effort in optimizing your “life development mindset,” leaving behind the other 99.99% of stagnant, uninspired masses becomes surprisingly easy.
Over the years, through Chinese metaphysics (xuanxue) and life strategy, I’ve helped many brothers and sisters go from simply ordinary to comfortably middle-class or even modestly wealthy. It sounds like a big deal, but it honestly didn’t take enormous effort — it was purely a matter of clarifying their “life development mindset.” Nothing more.
2 — What IS the “correct life development mindset” for this era?
We must also face one more brutal truth with clear eyes: the general public’s collective understanding is always — always, always, always — wrong and behind the curve.
Which means you can only use their thinking as a reference point. Never adopt it as your own.
It’s like this: no matter how weak your exam scores are, you’d never go to a class of rote-memorizing average students to learn their study methods — because they have no useful methods to offer. They’d only drag you into the same pit they’re stuck in.
Now let me introduce a mindset that has quietly become the shared consensus among those who’ve built real wealth: Profit in silence. Master breadth and depth. Cool heart, burning desire.
Profit in silence is the easiest to understand. Everyone has figured out that in today’s world, information leaks at a terrifying speed. So even if you’ve found a decent way to generate wealth, you would never share it. And even if your real estate, stock investments, or business ventures are clearly profitable, people use rhetorical cover — claiming they made nothing, or even lost money.
Don’t underestimate this small principle. It represents hard-won, blood-and-tears wisdom. In today’s murky environment, the moment you earn even a little, it attracts envy and resentment — especially from petty, two-faced people. The moment you drop your guard, expect slander, sabotage, and rumors. This is precisely why people with any real wealth have become noticeably understated in recent years, and actually prefer to talk about their difficulties. It’s self-protection.
And self-protective energy preservation is something the general public simply doesn’t prioritize enough.
Master breadth and depth refers to the fact that anyone in a meaningful financial circle now treats relentless learning as a lifestyle — not a task. They’ve long stopped coasting on old knowledge.
What strikes me most is this: the very people who designed and produced the short-video apps and mobile games that have captured the masses — those same people absolutely forbid their own children from touching these products. Instead, they require their kids to develop intensive reading habits.
On the “breadth” side, these people are genuinely passionate about exploring enormous new fields of knowledge: law, business, finance, technology. When any significant social phenomenon emerges, they immediately work to understand the underlying cause-and-effect and the operational logic — then quietly discuss response strategies with a small circle of trusted people.
On the “depth” side, they fully leverage today’s social media and knowledge platforms to keep deepening their expertise in their core domain — until they can definitively say they know what to do, why to do it, and what not to do. Just mastering those three things alone puts you miles ahead of most people.
Cool heart, burning desire is the simplest concept but the hardest to execute.
A cool heart means fully respecting other people’s destiny. For anyone who has no connection to your life and no real intersection with your path, you maintain a safe social distance — never getting involved, and never offering help out of some self-congratulatory impulse to be generous.
Different paths, different people. People at different levels of life simply don’t need to be mixed together. Because most struggling people take others’ help for granted. Long-term giving will drain your own energy and development.
Burning desire means not running from your ambitions — but treating your desires as healthy, forward-moving goals worth pursuing openly, without apology.
For example: even a girl from a modestly comfortable family who wants to marry up in life should wear that aspiration openly — on her face and in her heart — and make genuine, sincere efforts toward that goal. That includes developing her destiny framework (geju), her thinking, her awareness, her horizons, her appearance, her character, her communication, and more.
The same principle applies to the pursuit of wealth. If you want financial success, do not play the “my mouth says no but my heart says yes” game. Go after money openly and honestly.
“Openly and honestly” means: willing to learn, able to endure hardship, brave enough to try, sharp enough to reflect, and disciplined enough to accumulate.
A quick summary: Profit in silence, master breadth and depth, cool heart with burning desire = quietly working out the paths to wealth creation with a small circle of trusted people, while consistently treating the expansion of your knowledge and capabilities as a genuine interest — and above all, keeping your goals crystal clear and refusing to be distracted by unnecessary noise.
3 — Beyond “understanding the era and adjusting your mindset,” there are two more things that matter enormously.
The first is building your foundational hard skills.
I’ll be honest: I genuinely cannot understand why some people in their thirties and forties still haven’t grasped the basics of workplace politics, life planning, and property buying strategy — the required courses of adult life.
Take workplace politics. I regularly see readers in their thirties and forties complaining in the comments that their boss plays too many mind games, while they themselves are just straightforward, practical people — so they get suppressed and ignored.
For people like this, one line cuts to the core: The essence of workplace politics is resource allocation. It has always been, and always will be.
If someone has spent over a decade in the workplace and still can’t read each person’s underlying interests and needs — honestly, if they can’t even do something that basic, then they deserve to remain a replaceable bolt in a machine, with no strategic thinking and no decision-making authority.
The same goes for life planning, property strategy, and every other required course of adulthood. These are things you should be putting real mental effort into at every stage of your life.
As I see it, many people assume that mastering a single skill gives them “foundational hard skills.” What they don’t realize is that foundational hard skills are a composite of many things — and they shift with the times every few years. There’s no fixed, timeless definition.
So here’s a line I want to leave with you: foundational hard skills are ultimately a test of your rational adaptability.
Always remember: when you encounter any problem, your first reaction must never be to get swept up in the emotional thinking of lower-level people. Their perspective is always wrong. Always.
What you must actually develop is the habit of rationally asking — every time: What is the cause and logic here? And what can I do to get a better result next time? That’s all.
Everything else — your personal feelings, your resentment, your complaints — is trivial and unworthy of daily attention. Walking around weeping and complaining only makes you look depleted and weak.
4 — We’ve covered a lot of mental strategy. Now let me add some more concrete, practical suggestions.
— One of the deepest lessons I’ve learned over the years: short-form videos and mobile games have wasted an enormous amount of ordinary people’s potential.
People have no idea how precious those “spare 2 hours” each day actually are. They have no idea what a completely transformed version of themselves could emerge after one year, two years, three years of using those two hours intentionally.
Beyond that, short-form video and mobile gaming have dealt a devastating blow to people’s ability to focus sustained mental energy — slowly stripping away what little patience and willpower most ordinary people had to begin with.
Now, I’ll admit I scroll short videos myself — but for me, they are purely a source of inspiration, knowledge, and information. When I encounter something good, I immediately save it and jot down a quick distillation. When I encounter empty content, I immediately tap “not interested” to protect my information diet from contamination.
Simply put: in food, I eat clean, healthy, high-protein, whole-source nourishment. In information, I consume high-quality, professional, positive, high-nourishment content.
— Never spend extended time with friends who are chronically negative, low-energy, and draining.
People are products of their environment — and environments are made of people. So changing your circle is literally changing your environment.
Here’s the most classic example I can offer. These past few years, most people have been doing just okay — the larger environment hasn’t been ideal. But I have consistently avoided much contact with social circles that operate at too low a level. Partly because there’s simply no shared language. And partly because low-level circles tend to be intensely emotional — full of resentment toward the world, hostility, and constant complaining.
If you spend all your time surrounded by that energy, what happens? You start feeling every day that the world is about to collapse, everything is terrible, nothing has any hope — so you might as well just give up and lie flat.
And then you actually do give up. And naturally, life gets worse from there.
This is why, even at my most broke and struggling, I did everything in my power to surround myself with positive, forward-looking, mentally healthy friends — even when I had nothing to offer at the time.
But a good mindset and relentless hope? Those are the greatest capital of all. Because they generate a constant, powerful stream of mental strength that lets you bite through every obstacle in your path.
— Let me also address property — a topic many of you have been asking about.
My position here is clear and direct: do not under any circumstances consider any city outside the 4+7 tier.
The facts already speak for themselves: on this land, the only cities that can genuinely leverage the convergence of timing, geography, and human resources are these 11 cities.
The 4: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou The 7: Hangzhou, Suzhou, Hefei, Nanjing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan
Every other city will gradually move toward the same profile: population, but no industry. Daily life, but no development. Not bad to live in, but genuinely unsuitable for long-term residence ten or twenty years from now — because they will inevitably move toward a slow, irreversible decline.
As for whether to buy in these 4+7 cities — let me be blunt:
“In any era, a person who owns five or more properties in a good city will never — at worst — become poor, and will never face serious financial pressure in life.”
So if your income is currently stable and you have genuine residential needs, late 2024 is actually a solid entry point — within your reasonable financial means — to target the 4+7 cities and exchange into a good-location, small-to-medium unit.
The conditions: financial capacity allows it + owner-occupier use + good city + good location + small-to-medium size. All conditions apply together. Miss one, and the logic breaks.
One more cold observation: if you look carefully, the people who’ve lost money on property over recent years are almost universally those who knew just enough to be dangerous — and only followed the advice halfway.
Their pattern is always the same: heavy debt, inferior city, strange location based on someone’s pitch, purely speculative purchase. Honestly — how could that not go wrong?
— Following from property, let me say a word about cities in general.
Over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed: nearly every major industry is concentrating at high speed into those core cities. Meanwhile, if you actually look at the industrial composition of non-4+7 cities, you’ll find the vast majority are held together by sunset industries — old, low-margin sectors with nowhere to grow.
This is an unmistakable signal. It’s telling you plainly: if you’re not inside the “slice of the cake” circle in these cities, then as those cities age and decline, your income and your value will gradually, irreversibly decline with them.
And the so-called peaceful small-city life — the “slow and beautiful days” narrative — will eventually reveal its true face: no growth, no opportunity, no development, no future.
For ordinary people, the absolute worst thing you can do is swim against the tide of history while lying to yourself: “Wait it out — it’ll be fine. Everyone else is waiting too.”
Ask yourself honestly: what level are the “everyone” you’re surrounded by? How good is their judgment? Do you really not know?
The opposite is true. The best thing an ordinary person can do is move with the current of the times — to act in alignment with the era’s direction — even when that requires real effort and sacrifice in the process.
But five, ten, fifteen years from now? You will be able to look your family in the eye and say with pride: “It’s a good thing I made that brave, correct decision when I did. It’s why our family lives better today.”
— One final, simple piece of common sense to add.
Every generation has its own journey to make. If you’re anywhere between 25 and 60 years old right now, you should carve out a solid 5 to 10 years of your life for a clear-headed, purposeful pursuit.
That pursuit will be exhausting beyond description — grinding beyond what most people can endure. But it will absolutely, without question, be worth it.
I’ve been broke. I’ve had wealth. I’ve moved across China and the world. And today I still choose to build here — because I firmly, unshakably believe that this place remains a genuinely worthwhile arena to fight for.
And once you’ve developed real experience and genuine perspective across the world, you’ll understand: those who are capable make it anywhere. Only the incapable keep running — changing locations to hide from their own inadequacy.
So build the habit of engaging your brain. Stay calm. Think carefully at all times. Don’t be lazy. Don’t be a coward. Don’t descend into baseless pessimism.
Try to do your best at every single thing. Always eat nutritious food. Always absorb nutritious knowledge.
Work steadily for 5 years, and you’ll find you’ve left a whole wave of former peers in the dust.
Work diligently for 10 years, and you’ll realize you’ve quietly made a massive leap in life level without even noticing.
Keep going for 15 years, and you’ll discover that many things that once seemed impossible are actually not complex at all — they just required the willingness to keep biting through, step by step, until the results accumulated into something extraordinary.
And no matter how long your journey takes, I’ll be right here beside you.
Let’s keep moving forward together — my brothers and sisters.
— Master Chi