[Paid subscriber note: This article is written specifically for ordinary young people aged 18–35 from humble backgrounds. Read it carefully — it can genuinely change the course of your destiny.]
Also: if your parents’ net worth is under nine figures, or if they are not particularly distinguished within their own circles, then it is essentially impossible for them to have distilled the wisdom in this article into the kind of family knowledge that gets passed down to you.
As the saying goes, you must stand high to see far. The truth is, the vast majority of hidden wisdom and practical knowledge in this world can only be articulated and shared by those who have reached a certain level of attainment.
If you were born into an ordinary family, and your parents are just plain, honest, hardworking people —
Then reading this article today is truly a stroke of great luck.
Because once you step out into the world, you will genuinely understand: there will never again be an elder in your life who will lay out the early-stage strategies for breaking through with this kind of clarity.
After all, every extra person they teach becomes one more potential formidable competitor for their own descendants.
So this article carries a certain threshold.
And every word that follows comes straight from the heart — and carries great wisdom for turning your life around.
1.
I have deep contempt for people who lazily reach for the phrase “social stratification” as a way to express their disappointment. Truthfully speaking, we have not yet reached a state of complete class rigidity. Although the general sorting of society is largely in place, full calcification is still at least twenty years away.
This doesn’t mean opportunities are overflowing today. What I want you to understand is: even now, this is still an era where doing solid work, diligently developing your professional skills, and mastering the art of dealing with people will reliably carry someone from poverty to middle-class stability.
And you must pay close attention to the phrasing: “doing solid work,” “diligently developing your professional skills,” and “mastering the art of dealing with people” — all three components are indispensable. You cannot neglect any one of them.
Don’t follow the example of those cynical fools who only see how hard and exhausting their work is, see no progress, and then blame heaven, earth, and society for everything.
They never stop to honestly ask: “Could it be that I’m lacking in how I handle people — or that my professional abilities genuinely aren’t up to par?”
2.
If you’re skeptical of what I just said, let me share some of the most real cases from my own life — the kind of people I’ve actually known personally.
Xiao Wu is a carpenter I regularly work with in Shanghai. He’s 36 now. He left his hometown of Qidong at 18 to work in renovation. Because he works efficiently, produces excellent craftsmanship, and communicates well, he became what’s known as a “master craftsman” early on. His daily wage today is a solid 1,100 yuan — and he works all but three days a month, with two apprentices under him.
Lao Hua, twenty-six years ago, was a junior Shanghainese cuisine cook at my family’s restaurant. No formal professional training — but driven by a deep love of cooking and an exceptionally high standard for himself, he is now the head chef at two private-dining restaurants in Shanghai. Only 44, he travels between both locations daily to oversee quality, earning over a million yuan a year plus a 5% equity stake in both restaurants.
Sister Sheng is a friend of a friend — a graduate of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine who began her career at a top-tier TCM hospital, specializing in post-surgical recovery and rehabilitation. Because she excels at building relationships and has a genuine passion for TCM wellness, she eventually struck out on her own and opened a practice. She now serves a clientele of wealthy clients from Hong Kong and Taiwan, focusing on longevity care and rehabilitation therapy, with a stable annual income in the hundreds of thousands.
If I wanted to elaborate, I could easily list dozens more cases like these — even in rarely discussed fields like landscape gardening, I know at least three good friends who are quite financially successful, no older than their thirties, all from ordinary backgrounds.
The reason I’m telling you this is simple: I want you to understand that even as “social stratification” becomes increasingly apparent, real stories of people building success with their own hands are still everywhere. And there are quite a few of them.
3.
So why do most people feel that breaking upward is so difficult, with so much resistance around them?
The reason is simple: most people are fundamentally hesitant, indecisive, wanting everything at once while fearing hardship and avoiding difficulty — short-sighted, narrow-minded, emotionally volatile, and arrogant.
If you actually observe the ordinary people around you, you’ll make a startling discovery: the vast majority of average people are shockingly incompetent.
Ninety-nine percent of ordinary people genuinely lack even the most basic capacity for comprehension and critical thinking. Give them the simplest, most direct instruction, and they’ll still execute it full of errors — and repeat those same errors again and again, never once pausing to improve.
You’ll realize these people truly stopped growing after age 25 — spending tens of thousands of days endlessly repeating the immature, shallow thought patterns they had at 25.
And if you spend a long time mixed in with them, their logic and the rhythm of their lives will quickly pull you off course. You’ll gradually come to accept many of their ideas.
The most toxic idea of all is: “Just muddle through — fighting that hard won’t change your class anyway. You’re just working for someone else.”
4.
I have said this countless times: for ordinary people, the single most important thing is to absolutely, relentlessly avoid “repetitive effort” — meaning you must push yourself without stopping to acquire new skills, and more importantly, higher-level skills.
Only by doing this will your market value in the eyes of others continue to rise.
And only by becoming increasingly valuable will the people, resources, and circles you have access to slowly — like climbing a mountain — undergo a true qualitative transformation.
But as I said in point 3: the reason most people remain stuck is that they have completely failed to grasp that coasting through life is synonymous with zero growth — and zero growth means your “level” will never rise.
The result: whether you want it or not, you will end up as just another ordinary employee, a wage worker — carrying the same repetitive burdens forever, receiving the smallest share of the rewards.
Let me say this clearly again: don’t stew in resentment because you’ve given everything for your employer and feel inadequately compensated. Don’t let that bitterness push you into lying flat and giving up.
When you’re young and still burning with energy, that is precisely when you should throw yourself into difficulty and real-world challenges — and rapidly accumulate battle-tested experience.
Then turn that experience into capital and capability. From there, you earn the power to negotiate with bigger players, take on harder battles, and win greater rewards.
Until finally, you can establish your own enterprise and build something entirely your own.
5.
I myself, due to my family’s circumstances, spent several years operating at a fairly low level. The deepest insight I gained from those years was this: the poorer a person is, the more timid they tend to be — more hesitant in action, more prone to changing their mind.
What’s almost comical is that many of these unfulfilled small-timers are, paradoxically, extraordinarily smooth talkers — capable of spinning out sophisticated theories and clever reasoning about anything.
But for all their smooth talking and quick thinking, they never dare to step a single foot outside their comfort zone. They never dare to take any genuinely grounded, exploratory action.
By contrast, a large proportion of the wealthy and financially free people I know are not particularly eloquent.
In fact, many truly formidable figures — whose net worth would make your jaw drop if stated aloud — turn out, when you meet them in person, to be rather unremarkable conversationalists. Nothing exceptional about the way they speak at all.
What you can’t see, however, is that when they spot the right opportunity, they all roll up their sleeves immediately. They start from the most basic, ground-level angle and get to work. They keep learning and improving throughout the process, and eventually build one success after another.
Does this mean wealthy people have no brains?
Not at all. It’s simply that this group tends to direct their energy and mental effort into actually solving problems — not into endless, pointless speculation.
6.
Here I want to offer a particularly heartfelt piece of advice to young people: calling yourself “zen,” “detached,” or “lying flat” anywhere between the ages of 25 and 40 is not actually a sign of wisdom.
Because beneath that seemingly carefree attitude lies the defeated mindset of someone who is essentially saying: “I know I can’t win, so I might as well surrender early.”
But do you realize? As human beings, the 25-to-40 window is when we truly enter our physiological and psychological prime.
At this stage of life, you have abundant physical energy, mental stamina, and hormones that — having been tempered and regulated — are neither reckless nor cold.
Put simply: this is the optimal window for breaking open the possibilities of your life.
I’ve genuinely lost count of how many readers I’ve helped during this very stage — people who got their lives back on track and then, in just six or seven years, achieved major results in both wealth and marriage.
My most profound conviction is this: 25 to 40 is the golden age. Without question.
Think about it honestly: before 25, you’re too raw, too reckless. After 40, you’ve become too settled, too reserved.
Now — I’m not telling you to go out and work yourself to the bone at any cost the moment you read this.
On the contrary: love your life. Love your existence. Love every card that fate has dealt you. Then, with an optimistic and forward-looking spirit, try to play each card as well as it can possibly be played.
Trust me — you will not regret it. Not for a moment.
7.
I want to talk to you about your relationship with money. Because the prevailing views on money out there are either excessively materialistic or hypocritically dismissive.
Let me put it plainly: as someone living in a mature economic society, you must accept — whether you like it or not, whether you agree or not — that your income level is an objective, rational reflection of your capabilities.
If you feel your compensation is inadequate, stop complaining. Find a platform that pays better immediately — don’t churn up inner turmoil and then whine about it with a group of equally mediocre friends.
Also, whether you are male or female, you must understand: wealth level is currently society’s primary basis for stratification.
The cold reality is this: the more you earn, the more reliable, grounded, and high-quality the people you tend to encounter. Their values and judgment will also tend to be more stable and mature.
You’ll come to see this over time: those groups and circles that seemed so cool and exciting in your youth — no matter how avant-garde and unconventional their thinking — will largely reveal themselves around age 30 to be immature and narrow-minded.
I say this not to preach “money above all else,” but to help you understand: your income is the world’s measure of how much it recognizes you.
Of course, you can easily cite countless examples of extraordinarily gifted people who spent their entire lives far removed from money.
So — speaking honestly, based on your actual lived experience — do you believe you are one of those exceptional geniuses? Or are you someone who should be practically and earnestly building a good life?
Be realistic. That is true maturity.
8.
As the closing chapter of this article, I want to share one more core insight: as a young person, you inevitably feel that you’re living in a uniquely difficult era — your future feels uncertain, your environment unclear, all the good opportunities seem already claimed by those who came before, and you can’t access any of the dividends.
But the truth is: every generation has felt exactly this way.
As someone with deep experience in Chinese classical studies and traditional culture, and with extensive experience in destiny reading and analysis, I simply want to tell you:
Whether it was forty years ago, thirty years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago — or ten years from now, twenty, thirty, or forty years from now — for ordinary people, the best path forward has always been essentially the same. Different routes, same destination. And the logic of that path is simple.
First: don’t abandon effort just because your starting point was disadvantaged. And don’t coast just because your starting point was fortunate. Tell yourself that in your youth and prime, the worst thing you can do is let a swirl of idle thoughts slow your steps. Instead, steadily give your best to every single thing in front of you.
Then: cultivate the habit of reflection and review. Make sure that every night before you sleep, you have moved forward even just a little.
Progress accumulated this way is not fast — but year after year, it will naturally and effortlessly allow you to outlast wave after wave of competitors. You’ll win with ease and comfort.
On the flip side: never let cheap entertainment hollow out your time and energy. Every era has had its things that lead people astray — in the old days it was cricket fighting and keeping pet birds; today it’s short videos and mobile games. These are fine in moderation, but discipline is essential.
Look around: every person of genuine standing and stature — isn’t their life as high-quality and minimalist as possible?
In daily practice: isn’t every high-achiever’s free time filled with exercise, reading, meditation, and reflection?
There is one more especially important matter for ordinary people: do not become a slave to your emotions.
Emotional slavery manifests in many ways. In your work: don’t be swept away by grievance or anger. Keep your eyes on the long horizon. Learn to think through everything with a long view. Always remind yourself that as long as you’re growing — as long as your capabilities are strengthening — it is a good thing.
In your relationships: don’t let slander or prejudice throw you off balance. Operate always from a foundation of integrity. Then observe and think carefully about the motives, desires, and vulnerabilities of the people around you — and at the right moment, say the right thing. Make every person around you feel that they need you, that they have developed an emotional reliance on you.
And there is one more very important matter: marriage.
You are of course free to choose to remain single. But if at all possible, please build a life with a partner whose values are healthy and forward-looking.
I have encountered an enormous number of people and life stories. And the weight of that experience has made one thing unmistakably clear: a good match in marriage is not simply about having someone to share the day-to-day with. A truly good partner can instantly redirect the entire trajectory of your life — setting it on a course that is several times better than it would have been.
So I hope you will not be captured by some fleeting peach blossom romance (桃花) out of a moment of impulse and desire. Instead, your partner should be mature, rational, sincere, kind, and deeply responsible — and at the absolute minimum, someone who reciprocates the care and love you give them with equal warmth in return.
When you have all of this, you will discover: the people who built lasting foundations across every generation all followed the same script, just in different eras.
Every ordinary person who found happiness and success — in every era — has been performing a different variation of the same story: serious living + earnest striving + steady accumulation + warm care for family and friends.
I hope you take this to heart.