Student Question
Master, I’ve been a full-time stay-at-home mother for six years. Our household income suddenly dried up. My husband was abruptly laid off by his company in July. We’re living off savings now. He’s still job hunting but hasn’t gotten a single interview — this year feels impossible for finding work. We have two children, and my husband is under enormous pressure. I haven’t worked in a long time, so finding employment isn’t easy for me either. When it comes to making money through a side income — could you offer some guidance?
Master Chi’s Response
If you want to make money, you first need to understand the true nature of money.
What is money? Is it a physical object? What kind of thing is it, really? Money is water — it is cash flow.
To make money, you must understand how money flows. Unlike water in nature, which flows downward, money flows upward — toward higher ground, toward those at the top.
So how do you elevate your own level?
The first approach is to identify the direction of wealth growth. Every technological revolution brings an explosion of new wealth, because technology occupies the high ground — money flows there first.
And technology is driven by people. People are driven by needs and desires. Watching where money flows is, at its core, watching where human needs and desires point.
The second approach is to trace the transfer paths of existing wealth. In times of slower transformation, the room for new wealth creation shrinks and gradually plateaus. If you want to make money in that environment, you need to deeply understand how wealth transfers — it moves across three tiers: upper, middle, and lower.
The share of wealth each node along this flow can capture is different. Think of a river — it can carve out a fertile plain, or it can flood. Your job is to figure out where the plain will form.
This means switching between earning from wealth growth and wealth redistribution depending on the moment.
From a macro perspective, when looking at the current wealth structure, follow where the money goes — watch what capital is doing.
For ordinary people, there is only one path to making money: find a spot on the channel where money flows, dig yourself a gap, and let some of it flow into your pocket.
The first way is to earn from those at the bottom.
Give them the prospect of a path upward — that is, the opportunity to make money. The poor all want to become rich; they desperately want to earn. So for this group, what you sell them is the opportunity to make money.
There is another group. With them, you need to shatter their existing worldview — overwhelm them with the spark of insight. These people all want to upgrade their thinking. To earn from them, you must constantly raise your own level of understanding, using higher ground to crush lower ground, profiting from the gap in awareness. The best approach is to manufacture cutting-edge concepts.
Take the “explosive concept” industries as an example.
For those who want to get rich quick — what kind of scheme promises outrageous profits? Many dream of something for nothing, overnight fortune. So when concepts like digital assets and blockchain emerged, they swept through and harvested decades of accumulated wealth in one swoop.
You’re after their interest; they’re after your principal. The truth doesn’t matter — what matters is that someone believes.
Then there’s the business marketing training industry.
For this audience, you communicate using high-level thinking and intelligent concepts. And so every variety of marketing course, sales course, traffic-generation course, wealth course, and success-mindset content pops up all at once.
In reality, many of these courses are shallow — and yet people rush to buy in anyway. Why? Because it’s a feast of cognitive stimulation.
In a saturated market where everyone is struggling to earn, you need to keep iterating your skills and refining them to mastery — only then can you sustain a real income.
So: if you’re starting from the bottom and want to make something of yourself, you need the ability to disrupt others’ assumptions and elevate their thinking. That is one path to wealth. Without that ability, you’re left punching a clock nine to five.
Money flows upward. If your thinking is sharp, money stays. If your thinking is dull, money slips away. And if you want to dig yourself a gap on that flowing channel — to have money stream toward you like water — there is only one answer: raise your level of understanding.