A frightening reality: everyone working at the bottom—working on screws, delivering takeout, doing SPA, scraping off residue, doing SPA again, getting haircuts, burning electric welding, sweeping the streets—

In addition to a monthly salary of only 4,000–5,000, they basically don’t buy cars or houses, especially some 30- to 40-year-old workers. Some of them haven’t even been able to get a wife, and they’ve been living in a constant state of lowliness at the bottom. And the reason this situation is so tight and desperate isn’t that you’re not hardworking enough—it’s that you don’t know how to choose a direction.
Actually, society has always been realistic. Just like marriage requires a match in social standing—if you only know how to work at the bottom and get by on a monthly salary of 4,000, then it’s only natural that you can’t find a wife, can’t afford a car or a house, can’t earn 2 million yuan in savings, and that’s just common sense. After all, there’s no one who will favor you for being in cahoots with poverty and looking pathetic.
Maybe you’ll say you come from a humble background, you don’t have much education, you don’t have connections. If you can find a stable job and keep doing it for a long time, that would be pretty good.
But have you thought about it—do you think the job you’re looking for is really stable? Do you think you can live a good life with a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan? Do you think you can support your family with this small change?
You have to admit, this is the most foolish idea, and it’s just an excuse to avoid responsibility, because deep down you’re really timid.
You need to understand this: “working hard as a wage earner ends up with nothing”—put simply, if you keep working for others, your life mindset won’t just be bleak, miserable, stifling, anxious, and full of regret—you’ll also go through a very hard, humiliating, painful, mean, and lowly process in life. Because you’ve never truly experienced a life of wealth, never felt the peace of the soul, and never appreciated the scenery of nature. So in the end, your life is just a mess.
Don’t think entrepreneurship is hard—you have to understand that working for someone else is hard your whole life, while entrepreneurship is hard only for a period of time. Besides, you basically had nothing to begin with—so what are you worried about?
If you’re constantly afraid of wolves ahead and tigers behind, you’re destined to be poor. If you don’t know how to use the capital of youth to accumulate, improve, and transform yourself, you’re destined to be a lowly wage earner. So the root of poverty isn’t that society is too realistic—it’s your mindset and your ambition to make big money.
Look at billionaires like Jack Ma, Pony Ma, Liu Qiangdong, Lei Jun, Li Ka-shing, Cao Dewang, and others—none of them became rich without first improving their own thinking. They started businesses by using their abilities, connections, and experience. So you don’t have to treat your current job as your only option. What if one day you get eliminated by midlife crisis, plagued by occupational diseases from excessive overwork, or disturbed by all kinds of unpleasant things in life—by the time you try to change, it’ll be too late.
In other words, even if you can’t become a tycoon worth hundreds of millions, don’t the people around you who started from scratch also reach a net worth of 10 million yuan after starting their own businesses?
So you should first learn to believe in yourself, create yourself, and change yourself. Only then can you find the right position, and only then can you start a business and become the boss.
I have two living examples by my side. One of my classmates, after getting into society, kept working for others in a factory. His monthly salary was only a little over 6,000. Because the market hasn’t been doing well in recent years, he was laid off by the company last year. Now he’s doing odd jobs in a very small company, earning around 4,000 a month, and his life is truly miserable.
And another classmate of mine—after spending 3 years in society and feeling how harsh reality is, he planned his direction for himself. Through his own efforts and accumulation, in 2018 he started an e-commerce company. Nowadays, he not only has a net worth of more than 10 million yuan, he also has firmly established himself in a big city, and wherever he goes, he carries himself with respect.
Actually, from this you can clearly see that the root of being poor lies in yourself—in your choices and your planning.
It’s not hard to see that as long as you don’t treat your current job as the only bowl of food, and as long as you don’t sink into the work itself, and instead transform yourself in combination with reality, you still have a chance to turn things around and become a boss.