Today, let’s talk about something interesting.
When exactly do you truly feel the benefits that money brings you?
The answer: when you need to find quiet within yourself — and then channel that stillness into thinking, deciding, considering, and deliberating — you’ll suddenly realize that money is the barrier standing between you and the noise of the world.
Take this example: if you’re a young person living in a shared apartment, squeezing onto the subway or a packed bus for your daily commute, you’ll find it’s genuinely hard to quiet your mind.
Every day, small problems and petty friction from the people around you hit you at high frequency. Noise, smells, clashing habits — each one tiny on its own, yet together they have a very real impact on your state of mind.
But once you have your own home, your own car, you’re flying business or first class, and you move through spaces that are open and inhabited by a somewhat higher-caliber crowd — you’ll instantly notice a shift. You can focus on the thing itself without being constantly pulled away.
It’s like trying to work through a problem seriously while the hyperactive kid next to you keeps flipping open his pencil case or sneaking snacks under the desk. Once those distractions vanish, you’re completely locked in.
Work becomes work. Rest becomes rest. Exercise becomes exercise. Conversation becomes conversation.
And that’s exactly when human capability gets a geometric boost — when mental energy is fully concentrated.
Let me share something that’s half amusing, half worth taking note of.
Because of the dramatic ups and downs in my own family background, I’ve had the complete experience: first class → business → economy (the fall), then economy → business → first class (the climb back up). So I know exactly what that journey feels like, and how environment shapes a person — and how a person can use it.
That’s why today, for any flight over five hours, I always book first class. No other reason — just for the comfort of body and mind during that stretch.
Many of you know this feeling: once a flight crosses the five-hour mark, economy turns into a slow form of torture. Every minute you’re squirming. The seat is hard and narrow. Your backside is hot and compressed. Your legs can’t fully stretch. Getting to the bathroom means disturbing the aisle passenger — or being disturbed every time they need to get up.
So even though you spent five hours sitting down, your energy and condition come out depleted. That’s why so many people need to immediately find somewhere to crash and recover after a long-haul flight.
First class is a different world. You have your own complete space. You can lie down and sleep comfortably. No one bothers you, and you’re not suffering physically.
Some people even come to look forward to long international flights as a kind of pleasure. Certain premium carriers genuinely deliver an excellent experience in the air.
My own experience: on every international flight, first class settles into a kind of peaceful quiet about two hours in. I sleep deeply through it, arrive fully recharged, and hit the ground running — not a beat missed.
You might want to roll your eyes: “Come on, who do you think you are? So particular? Can’t handle a regular seat?”
Honestly — I can endure most of the hardships this world throws at me. My tolerance is stronger than 99.9999% of people. It had to be, otherwise I wouldn’t have survived everything I went through and come out the other side.
And precisely because of that, I know clearly: effective hardship drives enormous growth. Pointless hardship just burns through your precious mental energy (心力).
Remember this: every bit of wealth you build in this lifetime is, at its core, a refinement of mental energy.
This is exactly why many people in the early stages of life can’t make sense of certain higher-level spending. The gap is one of perception.
Why first class or business? Because it enables better rest. Why a better-located home? Because the neighbors are quality and the living experience is good. Why hire a housekeeper? Because it frees up energy to invest in your career…
Everything comes back to the same principle: the wealthier a person becomes, the more they need to conserve their mental energy — to enter a state of flow.
Because building true wealth isn’t just a test of physical endurance. It demands mental energy too.
Unfortunately, most people don’t understand this. They’re unwilling to take the wealth they’ve earned and use it to create conditions that are actually better for earning more. They just keep cutting costs.
The result: always working hard, always managing to save a little, but never quite reaching real wealth.
At the core, it’s using willpower to endlessly resist hardship — instead of using willpower to think and find a way forward.
Think it through — isn’t that exactly the logic?
(Tonight, I’ll skip the usual content at the end of the post — this was just a casual chat, a chance to talk freely with everyone. Also, it seems quite a few of you have been curious about the cover images I make for these posts, so I’m sharing this one here — take it if you like.)