This afternoon, over tea with a friend, I arrived at this conclusion: In your lifetime, you must experience poverty at least once — because only when you’ve truly hit rock bottom, with nothing left, will you understand just how terrifying it is to have empty pockets.
The people around you will reveal their coldest, most unvarnished selves. You’ll discover that in their eyes, you are utterly worthless — and you’ll find yourself powerless to do anything about it, unable to move a single step forward.
In your lifetime, you must also experience wealth at least once — because only by completing the full cycle of “digging for gold, expanding wealth, and accumulating riches” yourself, from start to finish, will you truly understand that earning legitimate wealth is not some distant, impossible dream.
It simply requires channeling your energy and focus in the right direction, then patiently waiting long enough for the harvest to come — slowly, steadily, gathering one substantial sum after another into your hands.
Over the years, countless readers have written to me asking: “Master, I genuinely want to find my own legitimate path to wealth. I have no idea where to begin.”
Whenever I have a moment, I copy and paste this personal reflection for each of them: If you’re an ordinary person trying to build real wealth, never let yourself be drawn in by anything promising “high returns, high dividends, high profits.” Stay away from these things without exception.
Never entertain the fantasy that you’ll somehow find your way into some astonishing-return deal and cash out in a single stroke.
Remember this: you are an ordinary person.
What that means is that your intelligence, your network, your capabilities, and your sphere of influence simply aren’t powerful enough yet. You won’t even gain access to these so-called high-return opportunities — and even if you somehow do, you’ll only end up being picked clean.
Because when real money is on the table, even blood relatives will turn on each other. What chance does an ordinary person with no leverage have?
Someone taking advantage of you is simply the natural law of the strong consuming the weak. They can call you gullible; you can call them unscrupulous. It’s an argument neither side wins.
So for you, the only legitimate path to wealth is through the snowball method — slow, steady accumulation.
For ordinary people, the right paths to building genuine wealth are always these:
1 — Build a personal IP: social media accounts and a small private-circle business.
This path suits white-collar workers, employees, and homemakers extremely well. Through consistent sharing of original videos and written content, you build a small but loyal following — then through group buying, product recommendations, or services, you establish your reputation and trust. From there, you slowly roll that small snowball into something bigger.
A significant number of people have achieved a modest financial freedom through exactly this approach — earning thirty or forty thousand a month. Not extravagant wealth, but steady accumulation over time, a comfortable life, and critically — not exhausting.
2 — Keep investing in quality assets, particularly publicly listed industry leaders.
One reader in Master Chi’s community operates with admirable simplicity: every time he saves a sum of money, he references my holdings and puts it into bank or utility stocks. He doesn’t worry about price movements — he just waits for the annual dividends, then reinvests them.
After five years of this, what started as a six-figure sum has grown to seven figures. He’s barely past forty. If he continues, financial independence is an inevitable outcome.
3 — Steadily accumulate property — buy one small unit every few years within your means.
For years, my view on real estate has been consistent: “Stop thinking about quick returns from property. Unless you’re buying to live in it, don’t bet on it as an investment.”
Yet one young couple surprised me enormously with their approach. Both holding stable government jobs in Zhejiang, they live frugally — spending only on necessities and saving diligently. Every four years, they buy a small one-bedroom unit near a subway station in a mid-tier city, making sure the rental income offsets the mortgage payments.
To stay safe, they calculate precisely — ensuring rental income stays 5% above the mortgage payment. Over five years, they’ve added two more units. Life remains modest, but their assets are genuinely growing, with zero risk exposure.
All they need is one round of monetary inflation to push rents up, giving them stronger cash flow and a larger snowball to roll.
Master Chi can’t help but reflect: the truly ordinary warrior never complains about circumstances or other people. They simply move forward, steadily and without deviation, on the right path.
Once I lay out these three paths like this, you immediately see that each one leads to excellent outcomes. And as time passes, the harvest only grows richer and more abundant.
But their starting point was the same as yours — a single yuan, a single cent, gathered bit by bit and put to work in the right places.
Let me say something from the heart.
Those who know me are aware that I once clawed my way out of extreme family business debt myself. I was not born with a silver spoon.
So I have been poor, and I have been wealthy.
Because of that long, hard tempering process, I now guard every yuan with care — because with the right plan, a single yuan and a hundred million yuan can both generate steady returns for you within ten years.
Every single person I have personally witnessed build and hold onto legitimate wealth — then roll it into a real snowball — they all share one trait: they treasure every coin in their hand and work with everything they have to make it count.
Treasure your wealth, and wealth will treasure you back.
Do this, and prosperity is simply a matter of time. Your legitimate wealth will come.
By contrast, it is the foolish, the ignorant, and the chronically greedy who chase those flashy, seductive “high-return big deals” with reckless abandon.
Honestly — if that’s you, I won’t attack your thinking. But I genuinely worry about your future.
One final truth I want you to understand: if your life feels like a tangled mess right now, it’s not because you’re stupid.
It’s because from childhood to adulthood, you’ve never lived within a circle where mature, grounded views on wealth, knowledge, and the world were simply part of the air you breathed. So at your core, you don’t yet know what the real path of lifelong accumulation actually looks like.
And because you don’t know, you can’t make decisions that truly serve your own good.
That delay costs you and your family an entire lifetime.
So yes — your life genuinely needs one serious year of allowing your understanding to evolve. To finally grasp how to play the game of life correctly. To maximize your own interests. To get that wealth snowball rolling.