Today, Master Chi wants to share with you a life formula.
This formula was shared with me by a highly influential elder when Master Chi was young. Because it has benefited me immeasurably, I have carried this gratitude with me all my life.
So I hope that whenever you feel lost and confused, you will recite this logic to yourself. Over time, you will come to understand the peace and power it holds. Because this logic has helped countless people rise from the very bottom to become elite members of the middle class worth tens of millions. It has helped countless failures climb out of the mud of tragedy and poverty, and ultimately achieve positions of great prestige.
Without further delay, here is the answer directly:
Success = Clear Wisdom + 30 Years of Hard Work + A Resilient Heart + A Touch of Good Luck
Now, allow me to walk you through each component in detail.
Clear Wisdom
The greatest strategic mistake in life is mistaking petty cleverness for true wisdom. For example, manipulating a friend with sweet talk and then feeling smug about the small advantage gained; or playing mind games with colleagues and superiors, feeling pleased about getting out of a bit more work.
Any form of petty cleverness that offers no benefit to one’s life at the macro level is sometimes worse than having none at all. This applies to Master Chi himself, as well as everyone around me who has achieved meaningful success — none of us are preoccupied with such trivial matters. Not as an affectation, but because such behavior actually drains your energy enormously.
The more you scheme for petty gains, the less energy you have for grasping true wisdom. It’s that simple.
So what is the difference between petty cleverness and true wisdom?
Petty cleverness produces temporary benefit and has no repeatability or sustainability. True wisdom produces lifelong returns and continuously accumulates, grows, and deepens.
To judge whether someone possesses true wisdom, simply observe whether they have clear goals in these areas:
- The ability to identify shortcuts to their own career development
- The ability to multiply their net worth again and again
- The ability to become an indispensable core figure in their social circle
- The ability to rise to a position of prominence in their career path
- The ability to become a master of their field through genuine passion for their work
- The ability to build a prosperous legacy for their family
These six points cover every major goal a person can achieve in life. Recognizing them and being willing to put in the work to pursue them — that is what clear cognition looks like.
To this day, Master Chi has never seen a single person achieve any meaningful form of success outside of these six major directions. Not one. And those who appear to have done so are almost always extreme cases of luck — the product of sheer chance — who inevitably lose everything in the end due to insufficient wisdom.
Of course, someone will inevitably say at this point: “Master Chi, you’re being narrow-minded. Everything you’ve said is very social-Darwinist, very worldly, even selfish. Shouldn’t a person aspire to contribute to society?”
Fair point — and I wouldn’t have brought this up if it weren’t for people saying exactly that. My personal charitable giving reaches six figures every year — modest, but certainly not insignificant. And the reason I’m able to make that contribution today is not because I am especially virtuous, but because I have the corresponding resources and capability to do so.
When poor, cultivate yourself; when prosperous, benefit the world.
If a person can’t manage their own life and still relies on parents and friends for support, grand aspirations can wait — changing that parasitic way of living must come first.
30 Years of Hard Work
No matter what you do, no matter what form of success you seek, time is an absolute non-negotiable factor.
Why do some people appear sharp and clever with strong logical thinking, yet still end up thoroughly mediocre by middle age — indistinguishable from the crowd?
I’ve encountered many such people. I eventually realized: they are like wine made from excellent raw materials that was never aged in a cellar. Without that accumulation of time, the flavor will always fall short by a significant margin. Their ceiling is “decent, acceptable, not bad” — they never quite touch the edge of “excellent.”
Many young people suffer from inexplicable anxiety precisely because they don’t understand that given their current qualifications and experience, certain positions are simply not available to them yet. But they feel their abilities are already sufficient, that they should qualify — and so they become desperate and restless.
Then what? Naturally, they feel unappreciated here and overlooked there. In the very years they should be accumulating and deepening, they squander their opportunities in endless drifting.
Then they look back and see that the friends who quietly kept their heads down are now, one by one, all doing better than them. Why? Because they were foolish. Because they couldn’t be patient — rushing to prove themselves everywhere — yet without matching talent or time-earned qualifications and experience. So they were eliminated again and again.
Some people always think: with real ability, the world is mine. Anyone who holds this stubborn belief comes from a family where not a single middle manager has been produced in three generations, I can say that with confidence.
Ability tells you whether you can handle something. Qualifications and experience tell you whether others will trust you to handle it. The latter is far more important than the former. And the latter is inevitably built through the quiet, long-term cultivation of relationships and reputation over many years.
Remember: unless you are a genuine, extraordinary genius, all paths of development ultimately cannot bypass the investment of time.
From my personal experience: whether a person can make serious money comes down, at its core, to the explosive release of accumulated potential at a given stage.
Those who build wealth around age thirty — you can be certain that between ages twenty and thirty, they went through suffering and hardship that most people couldn’t endure. Then, in their early thirties, all of that accumulated potential exploded outward at once.
Similarly, those who break through in their forties — though outsiders see it as pure luck, a windfall — had in the two decades prior endured immeasurable hardship and bitterness. That is what built their eventual capability.
I always tell the friends around me who ask about their future fortune: whether something will succeed is often determined the very moment you conceive of it. If you can honestly say, “Given my resources and network, this will naturally fall into place” — then it will most likely succeed. And where do resources and networks come from? Accumulated through years and time.
A Resilient Heart
During the pandemic, I often heard people say it was the greatest long-term negative event of their lifetime — the most difficult and tragic chapter of their lives.
One phrase describes these people: not quite complaining without cause, but absolutely among those with an extremely low threshold for resilience.
Was the pandemic impactful? Yes. But it is absolutely not the greatest long-term negative event that those born in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or 2000s will face in their lifetimes.
Looking at human history and development: any person who lives to seventy should normally expect to encounter:
- At least one to two periods of severe social upheaval
- At least two to three brutal wars
- At least three to four major economic downturns
And that’s a “stable” lifetime — not even counting natural disasters, plagues, or other unknowable factors.
Look no further than your grandparents’ generation. Their experiences were far more turbulent than ours. What is a mere pandemic to them? Most of them lived through three or four major wars firsthand. The various upheavals in between — there’s no need to elaborate.
Even our parents’ generation lived lives that could genuinely be described as sweeping and momentous. The radical transformation of the era, the seismic shifts in the business environment, the endless overturning and restarting of life’s rules and structures.
Don’t forget — if your parents were born in the 1950s or 60s, they can casually recount changes that, from today’s perspective, were world-shaking revolutions. What now reads as a paragraph in a history book was, at the time, the actual force of history directly determining the rise and fall of countless lives.
Seen in this light — applied to ourselves — everything becomes clear.
Those failures, setbacks, and sorrows that feel enormous to you right now? They are destined to be nothing more than a drop in the ocean of your long life. Except for death, all pain eventually fades with time into something as insignificant as a scraped knee from childhood.
So when clients come to me seeking a destiny reading and they are fiercely preoccupied with trivial matters — dramatizing them as tremendous suffering — I don’t even need to read their chart. I already know: this person’s ceiling is ordinary middle class, nothing more.
That is not a fault. Everyone has different levels of resilience and willpower. But if you want any form of success — any form, in wealth, career, or any aspect of life — you must possess willpower and the capacity to endure pain that is at least significantly stronger than the average person’s.
A Touch of Good Luck
When it comes to luck — this is, ironically, the topic Master Chi least likes to discuss.
You’re probably puzzled: Master Chi, aren’t you an expert in destiny reading? Why would you dislike the topic of “luck”? Surely when analyzing someone’s destiny chart, you analyze their fortune cycle (运势)?
You’re not wrong to think so. When interpreting a person’s life path, I discuss the person, I discuss the principles. But luck — I have always saved it for last, as a purely supplementary reference.
If you don’t understand why, you will after reading the following.
First, consider this question: why would a woman marry a husband who is morally corrupt, irresponsible as a family man, repeatedly unfaithful, and irredeemably so?
Many people might say: it was bad luck — she was deceived by a terrible man and fell into this miserable relationship.
But that answer is wrong.
“Luck” has very little to do with her marriage. At its core, it was a failure of judgment — that is why she ended up with the wrong person.
I know this sounds harsh. But it’s the same as those who get cheated in business or exploited by partners. At the end of the day, it’s not that bad luck brought bad people to them — it’s that they genuinely lacked the discernment to identify bad people and stay away from them.
So what to do? Simple: the stronger your ability, the sharper your perception — and the better your luck.
Master Chi hopes you will engrave the following deeply in your mind:
All misfortune comes from lacking the ability to recognize misfortune and avoid it. All good fortune comes from possessing the ability to recognize opportunity and seize it.
Once you understand this, you’ll see why Master Chi placed “a touch of good luck” last in the formula.
Because compared to clear wisdom, thirty years of hard work, and a resilient heart — the truly powerful cards in the deck — luck’s influence on your life is, in fact, quite small.
This is why I have never made “luck” the core of my destiny analysis. In my view, that is the domain of amateurs and dabblers.
What I offer you is a clear, certain path of optimal development.
My capability is to use logic and step-by-step clarity to help you gradually map out the best direction for your life — advancing strategically, one solid step at a time.
My capability is to help you trace the path most suited to you — picking every good fruit along the way, and steering clear of every muddy trap.
That is my value and purpose.
Otherwise, why do you think Master Chi has become a trusted consultant to so many of Jiangnan’s elite and the capital investment world?
Finally, Master Chi hopes you will write down today’s formula and place it on your desk and by your bedside.
Trust me — it will become a powerful guiding principle that helps you change your destiny.