The topic of “how ordinary people can accumulate tens of millions in assets” has been blazing hot lately. Open any platform and you’ll find crowds frantically debating it.
To stay current, I spent last night reading through the top takes on this topic — and the more I read, the more my brow furrowed.
The reason is simple: nearly every one of those seemingly well-reasoned articles was written by people who neither possess tens of millions in assets themselves, nor have any real experience operating in capital circles.
Their logic, thinking, and ideas are either self-contradictory or secondhand hearsay.
In short: obviously fake.
Why? Because those pieces only explore “technique” (术) level wisdom — the shallow stuff of “I saw a rich person do X, so let’s all do X.”
Sorry to say, the path to wealth is different for every person. No one has ever gotten rich by perfectly copying someone else’s wealth-building journey.
So what can actually sharpen your thinking and open your eyes? It has to be “principle” (法) level wisdom — macro, strategic life advice.
(As for the Dao level? Even people with ordinary billion-dollar fortunes can’t reach that. That’s a conversation for those in the tens of billions.)
No need to be long-winded about it.
As the saying goes: True wisdom is passed in a single sentence; false wisdom fills ten thousand volumes.
Everything below is a hard-won summary from my own years of practice — blood and tears distilled — combined with careful retrospectives on what I’ve personally witnessed in others.
Taken together, this wisdom is absolutely enough to guide a sharp-minded ordinary person from zero to tens of millions in accumulated wealth.
I say this with confidence because I am myself a practitioner of these very principles. It’s precisely because I successfully crossed this threshold in my youth that I can write this today with full conviction.
I hope it serves you well.
1.
The single most common mistake made by those desperate to get rich fast: they only talk about personal effort while ignoring the macro forces of the era.
They have a heart full of “I’ll grind! I’ll sacrifice anything!” — but no brain for carefully deploying precious capital.
The result? After a flurry of flashy but hollow activity, they collect the full combo: losses, failure, debt, and destroyed self-confidence.
This comes down to one thing: no big-picture thinking. Without a big-picture view, you can’t identify opportunity — you can’t even tell which direction the wind is blowing.
Tell me: how many people have you ever seen succeed by swimming against the current on this land?
2.
To follow up on that: I consider myself well-traveled in this world, yet I have never — not once — witnessed anyone fly upward by swimming against the tide.
Whether you’re a famous tycoon or a hidden billionaire flying under the radar, every single person who has risen to prominence has had the tailwind of their era behind them. This applies to ordinary people like you and me just the same.
At this particular moment, I personally believe the “golden age of wealth creation” has passed. The abundant expansion opportunities that were everywhere before are now saturated with competitors.
So your mindset must adapt. Do not do the work of early spring in the depths of winter.
In this era, the approach is: move carefully, accumulate steadily, seize small opportunities by putting in your energy, but never throw significant capital at wild ventures.
3.
Most of the life tragedies I’ve witnessed over the past few years share one common thread: people who only half-understood a field, saw the scene looking exciting, and jumped in headfirst.
Their willpower was dangerously brittle. A few inspiring stories and they’d start hallucinating — convinced they could get rich overnight. So they’d convert years of painstakingly accumulated assets into whatever happened to be trendy at the moment: things that looked popular but had never been tested by reality or time, built on foundations of sand.
The most absurd part? When a well-meaning friend tried to warn them, they didn’t listen.
Well. Reality has a way of slapping such people hard across the face.
4.
So my direct view is this — for the next five years:
Accumulation is primary. Wealth-building is secondary. Speculation is last.
Do not let someone around you pressure you into it, or let some inspiring “dream big” story fire you up, leading you to suddenly decide some new field is full of promise and charge in headfirst.
The faster you lose your head, the faster tragedy arrives.
If you genuinely want to break through — fine. But strictly follow this principle: “When you have ten parts of strength, only use eight.” Try not to operate beyond the radius of your actual capabilities.
If a friend or professional contact extends an olive branch, and there’s no legal risk involved, you can start exploring it in your spare time, treating it like play.
Many of life’s best opportunities are born exactly this way — half-working, half-playing, until something unexpectedly takes root and produces real results.
5.
Starting about two years ago, I began repeating one idea consistently: the coming years will be a world of fire and ice — two completely different realities existing side by side.
Why do some people say conditions are terrible right now, while others see their income climbing month by month?
Because the strong industries are still blazing hot. All the best compensation, all the promotion opportunities — they’re concentrated there: new energy, precision manufacturing, semiconductors, chips, energy storage, and so on.
For fresh graduates with the right major, or talent with relevant backgrounds, opportunities are everywhere. Step in and you’re on the fast track.
But industries being wiped out by this round of industrial upgrading? They’re destined to exit the stage completely over the next few years — just as horse carriage drivers found no means of livelihood after the internal combustion engine arrived.
6.
The points above were all macro-level advice. Now let’s talk about personal cultivation.
Just the word “cultivation” already puts this beyond the reach of most ordinary people.
Because when most people face work — no matter how exhausted or overworked — their core mentality is: “Good enough to get by, as long as I can eat and check the box.”
They’re unwilling to endure the hardship of sitting down, settling their minds, and systematically learning — the kind of deep work that would give them a genuine, comprehensive understanding of their own position and their industry.
The result? A lifetime that ends with nothing more than “a reasonably experienced laborer.” And a laborer, by nature, never rises to the top.
You must shed this habit that keeps wealth at arm’s length.
As for how — let me give you a small nudge and you’ll understand:
In this life, there is always a period when suffering is unavoidable.
Either you suffer in your prime — your strongest years — pouring everything into developing your professional mastery. That’s the suffering of cultivation.
Or you drift through your whole life achieving nothing, and then suffer the consequences: unable to afford a decent home, disrespected by others, watching your family settle for inferior hospital care when they need it most.
Two kinds of suffering. Personally, I recommend the first.
7.
Ecological positioning determines everything: resources run dry at the bottom; resources overflow at the top.
Why do I so strongly encourage you to endure the suffering of cultivating your inner mastery? Because if you actually commit to it, the real agony only lasts three or four years.
Once you’ve fully mastered your domain, understand the operational logic of your entire industry end-to-end, and risen to even a modest management position — for the first time in your life you’ll discover that there are so many resources and opportunities within reach.
And as your level keeps rising, you’ll find that the higher you go, the more resources and opportunities multiply around you — more than you can even keep up with.
Just look at these past two years of difficult conditions: who has suffered most? Universally, it’s the small employees and junior managers who can be laid off at any moment.
Meanwhile, those at the top — whether in business, capital, or running their own ventures — are receiving more invitations and partnership opportunities than ever.
8.
So what exactly does this “inner mastery” consist of?
Here’s my personal breakdown — it falls into a few core areas. Don’t be intimidated by the list. As long as your ability to handle pressure is strong enough, at each stage of your journey this inner mastery will naturally come looking for you. All you have to do is keep drilling and adapting. It develops on its own. It’s not as hard as it sounds.
The four areas are:
Wolf spirit, Buddha heart — On one hand, push yourself relentlessly, always maintaining the aggressive drive to climb higher. On the other hand, never lose your fundamental principles as a person. Let others feel that you’re someone who upholds the big principles with honor, while remaining rough around the edges on small details — a sharp, formidable figure who moves with both righteousness and cunning.
The dedication of a master craftsman — In the old phrase: “love whatever trade you’re in.” Whether the detail or the big picture, you’re willing to think things through completely. Those who truly manage this almost never stay stuck in one position for long — unless they’re too rigid, they’ll be noticed and promoted steadily upward.
The generosity of a brotherhood — Some think that giving freely is always a shortcut to building your circle, and honestly, that’s not wrong — nobody dislikes someone who only gives. But the true spirit of the brotherhood is clear debts and clear credit, clear rewards and clear punishments. When people work with you and succeed, share the cake — don’t be petty and calculating. If someone screws things up, make sure they exit clearly and cleanly. No enabling bad behavior.
Pressure resistance that doesn’t flinch at the sky falling — Those who have never made serious money often have limited vision — but vision alone isn’t enough. Your abilities need equally powerful pressure resistance to function properly. It’s like a soldier: casually firing at targets on a training range is completely different from maintaining fluid movement under live fire and landing precise shots into enemy positions. These are two entirely different things.
Master each of these four areas to around six or seven out of ten, and your future is essentially secure. Given even a small opportunity, you’ll naturally be able to start from zero, gather whatever resources come your way, and grow them to several million as a baseline — then push straight toward the tens of millions.
9.
Bringing personal cultivation and macro trends together, here’s my final summary:
In my entire life, I have never seen a single person skip directly from zero to tens of millions in one leap.
The real path of wealth always looks like this:
One day you wake up and realize you’re doing some humble job where laborers never rise to the top. You start thinking about improving your personal capabilities, and begin weaving together the external resources around you.
During this period, you slowly start earning small side income — thousands, then tens of thousands — though you don’t know quite how you accumulated it, and still don’t know how to scale it up.
Then one day, fate introduces you to someone — a so-called “elder.”
Nobody knows at first if this person is your noble benefactor (Gui Ren) or a pure con artist. For various reasons, they lead you in a higher direction for a period of time.
The result: maybe they really were your noble benefactor, asking nothing in return. Or maybe they were a fraud who left you penniless.
But once you pass through that crucible, you suddenly understand the ways of the world — and the darkness of human nature — in ways you never did before.
At that point, a new phase of wealth accumulation begins. You start pushing toward the several-million level.
When you actually have several million in hand, you discover something: the value of individual effort matters less and less, while the value of rational decision-making matters more and more.
Burned once, you’ll never again trust people so easily. In everything you do, you prefer to dip a toe in first, test the waters with small stakes, and even when results look good, you don’t rush — you slowly learn to leverage others and coordinate the people around you.
If it succeeds, you claim the lion’s share without hesitation, while giving others their fair portion. If it fails, you shrug your shoulders: wins and losses are normal in business, and you made the risks clear from the start.
Back and forth like this, you grow more mature, more steady, more professional — and your wealth grows with you, in each successive round of the game.
One thing you know for certain: this road is far more full, far more prosperous, far more beautiful than a lifetime of following the rules and punching the clock.
Yes, it carries more pressure and more risk. But you can bear it, and you can control it.
Then one day you look back — and you find you can’t even calculate how much you have. Three million? Three point seven? Or was it four point two, back when conditions were better last year?
You can’t remember. You can’t pin down the exact number.
But none of that matters anymore. What matters is that you no longer have to endure cold stares and contempt for the sake of some paltry tens of thousands. You no longer feel anxious and unsettled about life.
Because the thing that truly brings you peace of mind is not the wealth you already possess.
It is the deep inner mastery you built up along the way — in the very process of chasing that wealth.
That is the inexhaustible, eternal gold mine of your one life.
As for the moment when this great turning point in your destiny began — it was on a night in May 2023, when you came across an article written by an elder named Master Chi.
You vaguely remember the title:
“A Fortune of Tens of Millions Is Truly Not Far From You — Provided Your Thinking Is Clear Enough.”
Hmm. Not close, exactly. But truly not far.
You smile to yourself, chest full of quiet confidence.