# The 35-Year-Old Crisis Was Determined by Your Choices at 25

Everyone says the Chinese workplace is unfriendly to young people, and by 35 nobody wants you anymore. Is that really true? There are two types of people in the workplace: those whose paths keep widening, and those whose paths keep narrowing. Have you ever wondered what determines this?

Many people might say emotional intelligence, hard work, and such things. Are these important? Yes, but have you considered that some people's destinies are actually predetermined from the very beginning?

When you choose a job, a business, or a field, what's the most crucial consideration? People will say income or salary, as if suggesting anything else is manipulation or ill-intentioned, because only the money you can actually earn counts as real.

What I want to say is that businesses, jobs, fields—they all inherently contain "expandability." What does that mean? It means when you choose to enter a field, take on a position, join a company, or select a certain business model, you need to consider their inherent expandability. Your current income is just a point, but will you be able to expand horizontally and gain opportunities to do more things? What high-value people and connections can you access? What can you accomplish or create that, in the next stage, will allow you to earn higher income based on that foundation?

These are all crucial, but people only focus on immediate income and easily overlook these hidden factors. For example, abandoning a promising company in a high-growth sector to take an easy position at a relative's company because the relative can give you an extra 1,000 or 2,000 yuan monthly out of relationship obligations. Or having the opportunity to transfer to a more challenging position where you could meet wealthy people, but declining because you're unfamiliar with the new work and your current tasks are easier. Such cases are countless.

I honestly don't understand what you can do with an extra 1,000 or 2,000 yuan monthly? Improve quality of life? Why not lower your current lifestyle a bit and think more about "possibilities" in the future? We don't want to always linger at the bottom, using an extra 1,000 or 2,000 yuan monthly to afford a few more bowls of spicy hot pot or extra chicken legs. What we want is a day when we're no longer earning 3,000 or 5,000 yuan monthly—we want 20,000, 30,000, or even more.

Is this pie in the sky? I'm not your boss, so I don't need to deceive you. I'm only saying: using the earlier example, if you take an easy position and earn an extra 2,000 yuan monthly out of relationship obligations, what can you do when you get laid off? What's your portfolio? What can you write on your resume? "I poured tea for leaders at this company and brought the company 30 million yuan in revenue"? Isn't the so-called 35-year-old crisis exactly being laid off and finding yourself worse off than a fresh graduate? So who really caused this situation?

I chose to enter the cryptocurrency field because I saw that it will inevitably be a critical financial infrastructure in the future. Because of its nature and efficiency, it renders traditional finance into a sieve. You can't say many cryptocurrencies today can only be used for speculation, therefore they're not worth investing in—that's wrong. The replacement of traditional finance is inevitable; it's only a matter of time. And precisely because it's still in the infrastructure-building phase, I'm willing to dedicate myself to it, because in my view, it has a very long dividend period ahead, giving me sufficient time to accumulate without needing to change industries.

So what's everyone's crisis? They chose wrong from the beginning. From the start, they misjudged the value of "opportunities" and "possibilities." Why did Meituan, starting with group buying then moving to food delivery, suddenly make e-commerce giants lose sleep? If Alibaba hadn't happened to acquire Eleme, Meituan would have already stolen their core business. Because Wang Xing saw that the bottom layer of all these things is the same: getting the right things delivered to the right people who need them at the right time. It doesn't matter if it's offline, e-commerce, or delivery; the form isn't important.

But what about you? You're driving for Didi, delivering food, working as a server at McDonald's or KFC, or just doing small purchases for familiar neighbors, running a small convenience store by your doorstep. Can you make money? Yes, enough to survive. But if you do these things your whole life, that's all you'll ever achieve, because they have almost zero "expandability." People say AI came and took white-collar jobs; community group buying took small vendors' jobs; autonomous driving and delivery took Didi drivers' and delivery people's jobs—it's because what they were doing was fundamentally stagnant. These things had no connection with other more valuable work.

So why do some people, as they continue working, generate new businesses and possibilities, reaching higher levels? It's not because the person is particularly amazing, but because what they're doing has a deep foundation. As they dig deeper into their work, the deeper they go, the more they see other valuable things that share the same foundation with what they're currently doing. Thus, business expansion, social network expansion, and resource expansion happen naturally and smoothly—it requires no deliberate effort. As long as they keep digging deeper into their work, these opportunities emerge automatically.

While others are doing something with shallow roots, dead water, things that can't support deeper digging or lead to expansion. This is the fundamental reason for being eliminated. What looks like a technological black swan causing disruption is actually an outcome predetermined by the initial choice—the only difference being whether it happens at 35, 40, or 45. $BTC ‌#Gate Square AI Evaluator