Let me start with something that sounds mystical — yet proves uncannily accurate.
If you want your wealth fortune and career to truly flourish, the single most important first step is absolutely not to roll up your sleeves and grind harder.
Instead, you must first — carefully and patiently — purge the sorrow ghosts, misfortune deities, and bad-luck stars from your circle.
As long as these people remain a permanent fixture in your life, no matter how much you achieve in this lifetime, you won’t enjoy a single bit of it.
Because they will bleed you continuously — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly — and they will never be satisfied.
Take Xiao Gan as an example. She is a very, very special client of mine. On one hand, under my guidance and readings, she has made tremendous leaps in career growth and wealth fortune almost every year. On the other hand, her overall life circumstances have been getting steadily worse.
It seems paradoxical, but the root cause can be exposed in a single sentence.
Her mother is a sorrow ghost. The moment she learned Xiao Gan’s business was taking off, she immediately started treating her daughter like an ATM — openly demanding red envelopes at every holiday, then pressing her to step up and help out whenever some distant relative had a problem.
The moment Xiao Gan pushed back even slightly, her mother would immediately weaponize guilt: “After everything I sacrificed raising you, you can’t even protect your own mother’s face — you’re embarrassing me in front of the whole family.”
Her husband is a misfortune deity. The moment her career started gaining traction, he decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur — despite having absolutely no aptitude for business or investing. He kept manipulating her with lines like “A man builds the empire, a woman defends it,” coaxing her into bankrolling him again and again.
Year after year, it was Xiao Gan’s hard-earned money keeping his completely unprofitable company afloat. Yet he never once stopped to consider whether years of accomplishing nothing meant it was time to pull back from the edge.
Her best friend is a bad-luck star. The moment she saw Xiao Gan’s business expanding, she immediately sniffed out the opportunity and boldly demanded Xiao Gan hire her as a senior partner to oversee all manner of affairs.
Out of trust and helplessness, Xiao Gan gave her the chance — and this so-called best friend immediately leveraged their friendship to start causing chaos. First she was blowing up in sharp conflicts with other colleagues; then she was sabotaging deal after deal with business partners; then, hiding behind her close friendship with Xiao Gan, she was quietly pocketing benefits that weren’t hers.
The result: Xiao Gan had brilliantly caught the wave of the era. In 2018, she perfectly entered the influencer and e-commerce space and became a rising major influencer in the health and wellness sector. Yet after all these years, she had somehow accumulated almost nothing in real wealth or assets.
That’s why, near the end of last year, I finally had enough. During her regular annual fortune cycle (Liu Nian) reading, I laid into her directly:
“You are both brilliant and weak — which means you are destined to never hold onto what you’ve earned.
Do you even realize? Every single person around you right now is a parasite with a straw stuck into your veins.
Your constant tolerance and weakness only makes them see you as a fool who deserves to be exploited and has no instinct to fight back.
Keep going like this, and every last result of your hard work will be squandered and destroyed by them. You are like a donkey grinding the mill for these people — you bear the suffering while they enjoy the rewards.
Don’t expect any gratitude from them. They believe your sacrifice is simply owed to them — and the day they can no longer drain you dry, they’ll be the first to say you’re the one with bad character.
You must make them understand:
1 — Whatever comfortable lives they’re living today are not the result of their own efforts. They are a gift from your generosity.
2 — Their ability to drain you has been built on your past kindness and goodness — not on any cleverness or capability of their own.
3 — Going forward, if they want to benefit from you, they must first offer you genuine emotional value or practical value. You may pay them a premium above market rate — but they cannot get something for nothing.
4 — Anyone who harms your emotional state, your wellbeing, or your business gets exactly one yellow card warning. A second offense means a red card — permanent removal, blocked contact, no exceptions and no compromise.”
Why did I give her such ruthless advice?
It’s simple: everyone who has ever truly wielded great wealth and power understands the principle of keeping misfortune at a distance. Those who repeatedly subtract from your life should all be kept far away.
Over the years I have guided many readers of considerable wealth and standing, and our shared consensus is this: to make life progressively better, you must adopt the emperor’s mindset.
Toward sorrow ghosts, misfortune deities, and bad-luck stars — you cannot afford to be lenient, because indulgence only makes them grow bolder and more powerful. You must draw the lines early. When necessary, come down on them hard. Absolutely no going soft. Absolutely no laziness about it.
Put it more plainly: you’ve worked so hard to fill a granary with years of accumulated grain — all the more reason to regularly exterminate the insects and rats. Otherwise, the grain you bought with your blood and sweat is destined to feed their feasts.
This is especially true for families who started from the bottom.
Often the people closest to you are the most likely to breed trouble. The moment you start rising, the laziness in their bones begins to lean on you more and more — until they’ve become a heavy mass of wet mud dragging your feet to a dead stop.
In these moments, you must establish the household code swiftly and firmly — train the people in your home to understand that you, as the family’s cornerstone, cannot be compromised or eroded. Every major decision flows through you. Every minor annoyance must not be permitted to block your path.
Have you ever noticed? Nearly every divine creature in Chinese traditional culture capable of warding off evil and clearing misfortune is distinctly not gentle or meek.
The reason is simple: sorrow ghosts, misfortune deities, and bad-luck stars all fear power, not virtue. What subdues them is ferocity and firmness.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this: life is like a large box. Whatever you put inside that box — that is what your life becomes.
If your box is filled with sorrow ghosts, misfortune deities, and bad-luck stars, then your life is destined to be full of conflict, aggravation, harm, trouble, scheming, bad luck, and failure.
If your box is filled with noble benefactors (Gui Ren), true friends, and wise teachers — these auspicious connections — then your life is destined to be full of opportunity, wealth, good fortune, dignity, bright prospects, harvest, and achievement.
So tell me — what are you going to fill your box with?