Being a Laborer Is Not the Only Script for Your Life

In modern society, most people follow a preset script from the moment they are born: study hard, get into a good school, land a stable and well-paid job, and then spend their days running on a treadmill for the sake of family and mortgage. Yet when people pause to reflect, is this really the only purpose for which human beings came into this world? In truth, this seemingly self-evident mode of survival conceals a systemic design. To change a fate of lifelong toil, the first step is to awaken completely at the level of thought, to see clearly the underlying logic of how society operates, and to reclaim one’s true calling and autonomy as a human being.

The truth of this society is that there are only two kinds of people in the world: “landlords” and “tenant-farmers.” In modern society, the landlord is called the capitalist, while the tenant-farmer is called the wage-earner. Even the top engineer who labors for more than ten hours a day in a cleanroom, wrapped in protective gear, creates enormous value, most of which still ends up flowing into the pockets of Western capital holders. This cycle of trading your life for a salary, only to be locked down by taxes and loans, is essentially a modern-day life sentence.

Laborers trade their lives and their time for a depreciating currency. (Video 00166)

There is a story that marks the starting point of Teacher James’s decision to establish the mission of CLEC. A woman was admitted to the ICU, having already spent NT$150,000 on medical costs, with another NT$180,000 still to come. Her husband came to the ward, but instead of looking at her directly, he turned his body toward the doctor. The doctor understood, and said softly, “All right, let’s remove the tube and go home.” The woman was fully conscious. She reached out and grabbed the doctor, but could not utter a single word. The tube was removed all the same. A few days later, she passed away.

Doctors can save people, but the problem is that when you are poor, they cannot. Poverty is a disease, and this disease can kill you, because quite a lot of people do die of it. (Video 00470)

This kind of poverty does not only happen in hospital wards. It also happens on payday every month. This is what I have lived through over the past ten years. When I first entered the workforce, my monthly salary was NT$22,000. I believed in “the more you work, the more you earn,” and I threw myself into overtime for six years. But after watching a seemingly successful supervisor around me collapse from overwork, I woke up for the first time: no matter how hard you try, you may simply be binding your body and mind ever more tightly to the survival machine. Ten years later my salary had risen to NT$55,000, seemingly doubled, but my lunchbox had gone from NT$60 to NT$100 and NT$150. My quality of life did not rise in step; instead, I only grew more anxious.

Look, too, at the structural reality. Effective from January 1, 2026 (year 115 of the Republic of China calendar), Taiwan’s minimum monthly wage has been adjusted to NT$29,500 (Ministry of Labor). This reminds the public that even as nominal wages keep being revised upward, if the cost of living rises in step, most people may still remain stuck in a state of being “busy but not wealthy.”

The median monthly salary of an ordinary working person hovers around NT$40,000. In other words, NT$29,500 is the floor, not a comfortable norm; and even if your income reaches the vicinity of the median, without accumulated assets you are still easily squeezed by inflation and fixed expenses. Judging by the salary changes over these ten years, the numbers merely managed to keep pace with inflation, and did not genuinely open up any real breathing room in life.

The salary statistics from DGBAS (Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics) confirm this same feeling: between 2013 and 2023, the regular earnings of employed workers in Taiwan grew from about NT$38,000 to roughly NT$45,000 to NT$46,000, a ten-year compound annual growth rate of only about 1.8%. Nominal wages appear to be rising, but once the inflation of the same period is deducted, the improvement in real purchasing power is extremely limited. Wages failing to keep up with prices is the most authentic shared experience of nearly every laborer, not a matter of individual luck.

This is also why so many in the middle and salaried classes experience the sensation of “the harder I work, the more exhausted I get” — when the growth rate of labor income lags behind changes in assets and living costs over the long run, one becomes trapped in a cycle of being busy yet struggling to accumulate net worth. Let us first look at the comparison of salary and living pressure over these ten years, matching the subjective sense of exhaustion against the objective numerical structure of salary, prices, and the median gap.

▲ Figure 1-1 A comparison of salary and living pressure over these ten years, where nominal income rises while real purchasing power barely moves

The point of the comparison of salary and living pressure over these ten years is not to complain about wages, but to prove that rising nominal income and expanding real breathing room can decouple from each other. What truly drives people to despair is never being temporarily short of money, but rather trying hard all the time, yet seeing no way out. The moment a person begins to notice this gap, the awakening begins.

The price of poverty is not merely a shrinking number in a bank account; it genuinely takes away lives that could have been saved. In Taiwan, a term is quietly becoming the portrait of millions of people’s later years: the “elderly poor” (Japanese: kario rojin). They are not people who failed to work hard; they simply used the wrong method. They spent a lifetime working themselves to the bone, never learning to let their assets work for them, and in the end, the moment they stopped working, all of their income stopped too.

Many older people, because they do not understand investing, really do end up working as building security guards even after retirement. It is heartbreaking, and it should not be so. They had the chance; they simply did not know. (Video 00188)

It is not enough that you can live well right now. The question is what happens when you can no longer work, when you are 60, when you are 65. Do you intend to keep working until you are 80? And in Taiwan, the labor market already tends to reject people over the age of 65. (Video 00403)

That scene is perhaps more heartbreaking than any statistic. Teacher James once encountered a neatly dressed elderly woman on Nanjing East Road in Taipei. Holding a bar of soap in her hand, she said softly, “I have no money to buy food.” She looked respectable, her expression clear and lucid, yet on the streets of this city she could no longer produce even the price of a single meal.

And most of Taiwan’s young people in the middle class and below still have to give up their own entire lives in order to care for their parents, unable to work normally. (Video 00472)

This is not an isolated case. The research of economists and sociologists reached its conclusion long ago:

The biggest difference between the poor and the rich is that the rich hold assets while the poor hold cash. When the rich have money, they buy assets; when the poor have money, they consume. The rich make money with assets; the poor make money with physical labor. (Video 00370)

This gap is already determined by how you use the salary from your very first job in your youth. The sole reason this book exists is to let readers cross that line, forever, before they finish this chapter.

Reclaiming Autonomy by Escaping the Rat Cage

Modern society is like a vast, meticulously designed rat cage. Many young people take on student loans the moment they enter the workforce, and then, in order to build a family and establish themselves, shoulder heavy mortgages and car loans. The daily nine-to-five effort yields a salary that, after taxes and loan interest are paid, leaves almost nothing behind, forcing them to keep relying on next month’s paycheck to keep running. This state of mortgaging away one’s future life in advance and forever chasing bills is the classic “rat race.”

You cannot get out. You are a rat in a cage that can never find its way out. This is the tragedy of the ordinary person. And what I want to teach you is how to turn a life sentence into a fixed-term sentence. (Video 00166)

You make money for your boss, trading your life for it. You pay taxes to make money for the country. You take out a mortgage to make money for the bank. From start to finish, you have never once made money for yourself. (Video 00188)

This is the fate of the ordinary laborer: work hard, serve the boss, serve the corporation. When the stock rises it has nothing to do with you. You hand money to the government, pay taxes to the government, buy yourself a big house and a big car and think this is the goal of life, and the result is that you are trapped in a snare a laborer can never escape. (Video 00398)

Here is a true case. A 50-year-old professional already had total assets of US$5 million, yet over a US$15,000 employer match that his company would pay out at year-end (the Employer Match, meaning the retirement contribution a company adds on top in proportion to an employee’s own contribution), he hesitated over whether to endure another 90 days in a high-pressure work environment that was making him miserable. That US$15,000 amounted to just 0.3% of his total assets! Even with the assets of a rich man, his mindset was still stuck at the stage of selling time for money. This is the inertia of the poor person’s mindset.

The ultimate meaning of financial freedom is not to buy a yacht, but to possess the right to walk away from an environment you dislike at any time. The laborer’s rat-race cycle breaks this path down into a visualized flow: after income comes in, it is drained away layer by layer by taxes, loans, and fixed expenses.

▲ Figure 1-2 The laborer's rat-race cycle, trading life for a salary only to be locked down again and again by taxes and loans

The conclusion of the laborer’s rat-race cycle is direct: the problem is not whether income is high or low at any single point, but that the cash flow is designed to drain outward in perpetuity. To break this cycle, the key is not to work even harder, but to change the structure of cash flow: first stop ineffective consumption, then routinely convert whatever can be saved into assets. The real pressure of a mortgage lies not in owning a home itself, but in the fact that once monthly cash flow is locked down, life’s options shrink accordingly: you dare not change careers, dare not pause to study, dare not bear short-term fluctuations in income. When income is reduced to a single salary line, any change in the workplace becomes a survival risk.

The starting point of awakening is to stop measuring progress solely by hours worked and to measure it instead by asset growth. The method is simple: invest a fixed amount every month, hold for the long term, and let assets gradually take over the cost of living. Once this line is established, work will change from something you have no choice but to do into something where you can choose how to do it.

Let us run a cruel thought experiment. If Warren Buffett, worth hundreds of billions of dollars and now 95 years old, walked up to you today and offered to trade all of his wealth for your youth and health, would you make the swap? Absolutely no one would! This proves a cruel reality: the youth and time people possess right now are priced, in a free market, at far more than US$100 billion. They are the scarcest form of primary capital. The essence of investing is not to trade health worth hundreds of billions for a meager salary, but to learn to use this primary asset to lever a far greater return on capital.

For those who draw a stable salary (especially civil servants, military, and teachers), the fence of the rat cage is invisible and painless: the salary is fixed, the benefits are complete, the risk is low. The most terrifying thing about this kind of stability is that it slowly wears away one’s sensitivity to financial risk and one’s motivation to break out. On the surface it is a safe harbor; in reality it is more like a pot of slowly warming water under the continuous heat of inflation. The first step of awakening is to realize that stable income is often the strongest adhesive keeping a person bound to the system for life.

Many people clearly know that the way they are working is inefficient, yet they still dare not stop, and the reason is not that they are irrational, but that they have long been bound by three voices: family says “be stable,” the workplace says “work yourself to the bone,” and peers say “keep up.” So the moment they do not work overtime, do not chase the trends, or do not buy a home according to the mainstream script, they immediately feel a sense of guilt over “whether I am not trying hard enough.” The most terrifying thing about this pressure is that no one actually has to come and police you; you pass judgment on yourself first.

To take back control, the first step is not to try harder, but to reset the scoring standard: evaluate yourself by long-term net worth and quality of life, rather than by how busy you are and how others see you. The fork between the laborer’s cycle and the capital cycle is precisely where the endgame splits: with the same effort, the outcomes of the two paths are completely different.

▲ Figure 1-3 The fork between the laborer's cycle and the capital cycle

The core of the fork between the laborer’s cycle and the capital cycle is not a feel-good slogan, but a matter of path selection: if income is not converted into assets, it will forever remain in the laborer’s loop. Many people read “lying flat” as laziness, but the more common situation is this: you put in more and more, yet your income is only enough to keep pace with rent, prices, and loans, so you begin to doubt whether effort works at all. What needs to change at this point is not willpower, but strategy: guard your cash flow, cut unnecessary expenses, fix the amount you invest, and let a portion of income automatically convert into assets each month. Only when you move your energy away from ineffective churning toward things that can accumulate and compound will the pace of accumulation truly change.

Breaking the Enslaving Trap of Traditional Education

From childhood on, society’s values relentlessly instill the idea that “all pursuits are lowly, only book learning is high.” Parents and teachers hope their children can, through good academic results, exchange for an admission ticket to work at a large corporation. But this education system, from its very design, tends to emphasize only professional skills and obedience. Its essence is to supply an endless stream of efficient labor to corporations and society.

Over the long course of schooling, from elementary school through middle school, university, and all the way to a doctoral program, students learn all sorts of difficult subjects, yet almost never take a single class that teaches how to understand capitalism, how to manage money, or how to make money work for them. This information asymmetry and the deliberate absence of financial education cause most people, the moment they step into society, to fall defenseless into the predicament of having to sell their time and labor to exchange for the resources of survival.

Traditional education is a form of vocational training in which capitalists cultivate laborers. It is: study hard; studying hard lets you get into university; getting into university lets you find a good job. (Video 00401)

The modern school system was born of the Industrial Revolution, designed to cultivate an obedient, punctual, order-following labor force, not independent-thinking capitalists. A laborer only needs to know how to work; he does not need to know how to become rich. If everyone understood how to manage money, there would be no one left to staff the factories. Capitalists need laborers to be poor so that laborers will obediently work; the financial industry needs laborers to be ignorant so that laborers will hand over their hard-earned money for them to manage.

The entire state apparatus and the entire education system are designed for the purpose of cultivating laborers to serve capitalists. So which things are traps and which are the true path of capitalism, ordinary people cannot tell apart. (Video 00554)

Many descendants of the middle class compete through churning, spending large sums on private schools and cram schools, only for the result to be that they spend a pile of money to turn their children into “high-grade laborers.” Even if they attend an Ivy League school, the ceiling on their post-graduation salary was decided long ago. By contrast, the child of a rich family already has an asset system in his account, producing a cash flow of US$400,000 a year for him. The truly rich never rely on education alone to turn their fate around, because they already stand at the finish line, while middle-class families join this rigged race like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube. This is an enslaving trap that drains time and spirit.

Many older people hand their money to insurance companies in pursuit of surface-level safety, only to fall into the trap of the system. Let us run a cruel calculation. Starting in 1995, a father contributed NT$3,000 a month to an endowment insurance policy. Over 20 years the total principal invested was NT$720,000, yet 30 years later the total value had only crept up to NT$760,000, an annualized return of only about 0.5%. Its purchasing power had long been silently diluted by inflation! But if he had awakened completely at the level of thought and put the same funds into a NASDAQ index ETF yielding around 12% annualized (such as 00662), contributing with discipline every month for 20 years, then stopping contributions and letting the assets quietly compound, after 30 years it would have grown to more than NT$8.57 million. One stalls at NT$760,000; the other magnifies to NT$8.57 million. This is the vast wealth chasm created by whether or not the mind has awakened.

▲ Figure 1-4 The 30-year fork in fate between endowment insurance and an index ETF, where the same principal compounds to wildly different final values depending on the annual return

On the surface, the game of capitalism is “legal money flows, all documented and accounted for,” but at its core it is “first lock in the classes, then shuffle the chips”: most of the chips ultimately flow upward, a few flow to the “high-quality laborers,” and the overwhelming majority pool with the “top capitalists,” while the bottom-tier laborers instead get liquidated and bleed out in this financial game.

People must realize that this traditional educational yoke and “jar-pickle culture” of stagnant conformity invisibly constrains their imagination of wealth and freedom. If you blindly regard having a good job as the highest achievement in life, you have effectively walked willingly into the enslaving trap. True awakening begins with questioning this standard script, and starting to actively fill in the financial understanding that traditional education left out.

Returning to Life’s True Calling, for God Did Not Make Man to Be a Laborer

After recognizing the limits of the education system, we must ask anew about the essence of life. Many people gradually grow numb amid day after day of overtime and high-pressure environments, taking hard labor for granted and even taking pride in it. Yet the human species was created for something far greater than merely becoming a gear that drives the great wheel of the economy, or spending an entire lifetime anxious over how to cover living expenses.

When we are born, we do not come to be laborers. Our true calling is not to be laborers. God, when he made man, did not make man to be a laborer. He made man to think, to experience this one life, to be happy. (Video 00520)

Society and the state want you to be a laborer, but you must refuse this. So if not a laborer, then what? Do the things you are genuinely interested in, and the things that help society. (Video 00532)

The core meaning of life lies in experiencing, thinking, and pursuing happiness. Everyone has the right to feel the beauty of the world, to accompany their family as they grow, and to explore their own potential. When people spend the entire essence of their lives on endless labor, they are automatically surrendering the highest value of being human. Only by awakening this inner self-awareness and refusing to make laborer the sole label of one’s identity can a person shift the center of gravity of life from survival to living.

Within the capitalist system, if you rely for the long run on the single path of being obedient, working overtime, and drawing a salary, your life’s options grow fewer and fewer: you dare not resign, dare not switch careers, dare not bear short-term income fluctuations. The problem is not diligence, but an overly single-track income structure. What truly needs to change is not your work attitude, but the direction of your money flow: continuously convert part of your labor income into appreciating assets, and gradually build a second cash flow. Once assets begin to take over the cost of living, work will change from something you have no choice but to do into something where you can choose how to do it.

Many people cannot turn their situation around, not because they do not try hard enough, but because their after-work hours are eaten up by short videos, games, and instant information. In the short term it looks like relaxation, but the long-term result is very direct: no time to learn new skills, no time to organize assets, and income growth gets stuck too. This is not a willpower problem but a scheduling problem. Doing just three things is enough to start: set a fixed daily cap on entertainment, turn off phone push notifications and social platforms’ auto-push, and reserve one uninterrupted block of time for reading and tracking your assets. Do this for a few consecutive months and the gap will begin to widen.

The Value of Work Lies in Serving the Public

Awakening does not mean negating work; it means redefining the purpose of work. When you are pushed along by the pressure of survival, work easily gets reduced to nothing but exchanging for a salary. Only when assets gradually take over basic living needs does work get the chance to return to its essence of serving the public and self-realization.

Work is not for making money. If you say work is for making money, then you are a slave. But if work is not for making money, if work serves the public, then you have found the meaning of life. (Video 00524)

Once the financial foundation gradually stabilizes, the core value of work is no longer being forced to exchange for a salary, but actively choosing to place your abilities on the people and causes you truly want to serve. Just as Teacher James has taught on his channel for twenty years without ever taking a single cent, and yet works with great fulfillment and joy. Only when you no longer bow down for a bowl of rice does the meaning of work truly emerge; this is the center of gravity of a life that has shifted from the laborer’s mindset to the capitalist’s mindset.

The Strategic Significance of Accumulating Your First Pot of Gold

This book strongly criticizes the laborer’s mindset, but it does not negate the initial value of labor. For the ordinary person who does not yet possess capital, raising active income (salary) is the necessary path to starting up this capital system. Work is for obtaining the initial fuel to conduct capitalist investing.

To break the myth of the first pot of gold: getting started does not require millions in capital, only a small but very early discipline of starting. Even if you set aside just a small fixed sum each month and invest it for the long term in highly productive index assets, time will slowly widen the gap.

You could go work at McDonald’s, make 3,000, save 1,000, and you can still be a multimillionaire. You too can be a person worth ten million dollars, right? (Video 00482)

Estimating with the NASDAQ-100’s historically effective annualized return of 12%, for an investor who does not yet have a large amount of principal, if you adopt a “dollar-cost averaging (DCA)” strategy and start at age 30:

• Invest US$325 at the start of each month (total invested over 30 years about US$117,000), and after 30 years the account will accumulate roughly US$1 million.
• Raise it to US$3,246 per month, and over the same period you reach US$10 million.

Regarding this book’s assumption for the annualized rate of return: compound-interest projections are uniformly set at the NASDAQ-100’s neutral 12% annualized. A summary of data across various periods and definitions is compiled below for readers to weigh for themselves:

The NASDAQ-100, since its inception in 1999, over a long cycle that fully covers the dot-com bubble (a maximum drawdown exceeding -80%) and the financial crisis, has a CAGR of about 10%; the shorter the period and the closer it sits to the recent tech bull market, the higher the number; the roughly 19% annualized over the trailing 10 years falls within this tech bull-market stretch, and for the sake of robustness the projection does not extrapolate it directly into the future, instead taking a more conservative long-term value. The approach recommended by Teacher James’s CLEC GPT for configuration projections is: take QQQ at 10% to 12%, leveraged QLD at 12% to 15%, and cash and short-term bonds at 2% to 4%; and if you further deduct about 3% inflation, the real return drops by about another 3 percentage points.

CLEC’s core reminder is this: what truly matters is never whether QQQ will be 10% or 12% in the future, but whether you can survive a -30% to -80% crash like 2000, 2008, or 2022 without selling out. First prove that you have 15 years of cash flow, then talk about an aggressive allocation. This book sets the figure at 12%, but the more conservative may switch to 10% on their own, and those bullish on tech’s long-term growth may re-run the projection at 15%.

More critical still is that the earlier you start, the less effort it takes: if you act in your early twenties and possess a 40-year time window, you need only about US$102 a month to reach the same goal. The gap made by your starting age is that large.

Basically, squeezing out NT$5,000 a month to invest is not difficult. Invest NT$5,000 a month in index assets yielding 12% annualized, and after 47 years the assets will exceed NT$100 million.

Many people complain that they were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but the moment they take action, they become the first generation of the wealthy. Here is a direct calculation. If starting at age 20 you take out just NT$10,000 (about US$300) each month, and using the power of compounding you invest it in a target yielding about 12% annualized (such as QQQ), then over 40 years to retirement at age 60, you invest a total principal of only NT$4.8 million, yet the assets, principal plus interest, will reach as high as NT$97.93 million. This is the scientific origin of “the hundred-million-dollar investment lecture.” Accumulate a small flow of money, and through time you can complete a leap across the class divide.

Look at the story shared by a member of the community (an employee of a state-owned enterprise). He had served at his company for a full 16 years, originally brainwashed by traditional education into believing that “borrowing money is a bad behavior,” until his thinking awakened and he began using leverage to accumulate assets. By 2026, his passive income had reached as high as NT$1.23 million, formally crossing the compounding inflection point to surpass his primary-job income of NT$1.17 million, while his stock assets broke through NT$12 million. This proves that only by breaking the enslaving trap can you take the autonomy of your life back into your own hands. The so-called “compounding inflection point” refers to the turning point at which the principal has accumulated to where financial capital is enough to run neck and neck with human capital (work income). From that point on, the rate of asset appreciation will outpace the rate of salary growth, and compounding truly begins to display its astonishing explosive power. Most people give up on investing precisely because they cannot endure the long, seemingly reward-less accumulation period before the inflection point.

Before reaching financial freedom, working actively and converting every scrap of surplus value into index units is the only shortcut to turning your fate around.

Here is a strikingly powerful comparison:

• An engineer earning US$100,000 a year, investing US$50,000 a year (dollar-cost averaging monthly, researching index funds himself, at 10% annualized).
• A doctor earning US$200,000 a year, investing US$100,000 a year (dollar-cost averaging monthly, handing it to a financial advisor, at 5% annualized after management fees are deducted).

Intuition tells readers that “the doctor’s annual investment is double the engineer’s, so he should win.” But open the books 35 years later:

• The doctor’s account has accumulated US$9.27 million.
• The engineer, however, has accumulated US$14.27 million.

A full 54% more than the doctor. If the engineer had also adopted the doctor’s strategy at a 5% return, he would have accumulated only US$4.64 million; in other words, those few weeks spent learning index investing and how leverage works earned the engineer an extra US$9.64 million.

If after retirement neither man adds any further investment and simply lets the assets sit for another 20 years, the doctor’s assets grow to US$24.61 million, while the engineer’s push all the way toward US$100 million, reaching US$96.03 million, and the gap widens to 290%. The iron law of this case is: the per-unit return on investing in learning how capital operates far exceeds the per-unit return on getting a raise through labor. Financial intelligence and systems are the true leverage; principal and job titles are not. The more fundamental reason is this: the doctor’s high salary belongs to human capital, and human capital has an innate ceiling. A day has only 24 hours, one person’s career lasts only a few decades, and even the most elite professional salary will eventually top out; you cannot break this physical limit by trying harder. Financial capital, by contrast, has no ceiling on its compounding. As long as you convert limited human capital into assets early and let them keep compounding in the market, time will magnify it for you without end.

The doctor bet his whole life on maximizing his human capital, while the engineer converted his human capital into limitless financial capital. This 290% gap in their later years is, in essence, labor with a ceiling pitted against compounding without one.

▲ Figure 1-5 The capital long-distance race between the engineer and the doctor, where self-researched index investing beats handing it to an advisor, and the longer the time the wider the gap

This is also why the first pot of gold does not need to arrive all at once, but needs steady input. First use work to build a sustainable cash surplus, then routinely convert that surplus into asset positions.

Escaping the rat cage is not only about reclaiming autonomy for yourself; it is also about giving the next generation a higher starting point. Judging by the compound-interest projections earlier in this chapter, as long as you do not interrupt your contributions and hold for the long term, the key is not to predict the market but to keep staying on the compounding track.

Accumulating your first pot of gold, stripped to its essence, is simply changing the impulse to spend now into the habit of investing first. Set aside a fixed investable amount each month, and buy assets before you consume. It looks slow, but over the long run the gap is the largest. Whether you can defer consumption is often the watershed for whether you can cross the threshold of class.

The personal-finance author Huang Pei-yuan, in “The Bible of Personal Finance,” demonstrates the compounding structure with NT$14,000 a year, 20% annualized, over forty years: the first 10 years accumulate only 0.35% of total wealth, and years 11 through 20 account for only 2.19%; the true explosion surges in the final ten years, which alone consume 83.88% of total wealth. Here the 20% is the illustrative value Huang used in his original book to highlight the “late-stage explosion.” The role of principal recedes year by year, while the role of compounding magnifies year by year.

▲ Figure 1-6 The "final-ten-year explosion" structure of compounding, where the overwhelming majority of wealth surges in the last ten years

Source: Huang Pei-yuan, "The Bible of Personal Finance"

Compounding is not magic; it is the result of the discipline of time. In that projection where 40 years compounds to NT$97.93 million, the principal you yourself invested accumulates to only NT$4.8 million, just about 4.9%, while the remaining 95.1% all comes from compounding. This is precisely the true proportion of time working on the investor’s behalf. This chapter first establishes this core idea: the earlier you start, the more you can let assets work for you; the later you start, the more you must use higher contributions to catch up. The illustration of the 40-year compounding trajectory and the advantage of an early start further stretches this gap into a complete 40-year trajectory, making the cost difference between starting early and starting late clear at a single glance.

▲ Figure 1-7 The 40-year compounding trajectory, where the earlier you start, the more the final value comes from compounding rather than principal

The point of the illustration of the 40-year compounding trajectory and the advantage of an early start is not merely whether the curve looks pretty, but understanding that within the same 40-year window, the earlier you start the more you can exchange a lower monthly contribution for a higher final value; the later you start, the more you must use a larger cash flow to forcibly chase time.

The Capitalist Awakening

The capitalist system was designed by capitalists, so unemployment is a necessary condition of capitalism, because it gives laborers a sense of urgency, so they will work obediently. (Video 00555)

When the government prints money your stocks will rise. Do not hold cash; cash will become useless, but assets will rise. The poor have no assets, so they end up miserable. (Video 00184)

The more US-dollar IOUs you hold, the more easily you are, in essence, swept into the financial order led by the United States, reduced to a financial colony. (Video, casual-talk 00001)

Labor income will depreciate, and what the laborer receives for working hard is a currency that will depreciate, which I call garbage. This currency that will depreciate, this garbage, must be exchanged for assets, and only then are you making the stronger financial move. Yet the ordinary laborer trades his life for this garbage, and still hoards it in the bank like treasure. (Video 00490)

On the surface it looks like mere price increases, but in essence it is often the purchasing power of money being diluted; if you remain stuck in the habit of only saving cash without any asset allocation, you are effectively exposing a lifetime’s labor to depreciation risk over the long run.

You are poor because your cognition is not up to par, not because the system makes you poor. The disease of poverty is very widespread. Our mission is precisely to cure the disease of poverty. (Video 00518)

Understanding the logic of how society operates is not for the sake of complaining, but for making better asset decisions. When labor income can be steadily converted into assets, life is no longer left with only the single path of trading time for a salary.

There is a moral point that is easy to confuse and needs clarifying: on the distribution end, capitalism does indeed subject laborers to systemic exploitation, but on the production end, it is the most powerful engine driving the progress of human civilization. Without the capital market to catch it, there would be no venture capital; without venture capital, tech giants that rewrote human life, such as Apple, Google, and Meta, would never have been born.

Investors and capitalists make an enormous contribution to the progress of society and of all humanity. Without venture-capital funds, there would be no Apple, no Google, no Facebook, and so on! Because venture capital ultimately hopes to profit by taking a company’s stock public, and without stock-market investors there would be no venture capital. We investors are the very driving force behind venture capital, and venture capital provides the momentum for startup industries. Without capital markets and without venture capital, there would be no startup industries, and the world would be miserable, its growth unimaginably slow. (Video 00085)

For the awakening reader, this carries a layer of psychological meaning: when an investor shifts from the laborer’s end to the capitalist’s end, he need not carry the moral guilt of “getting something for nothing.” Providing capital, bearing the risk of volatility, and sacrificing short-term consumption in exchange for long-term return; this contribution is the true fuel for startup industries, top enterprises, and the technological progress of society as a whole. To transform into a capitalist is, in essence, to stand on the side of the engine that “drives human progress,” rather than on the opposing side that “exploits laborers.”

Readers should also watch for policy risk: when rules change frequently, when the tax system is unstable, or when property-rights protection is insufficient, long-term asset accumulation gets undermined. In practice, the point is not to guess at political slogans, but to place your assets in markets where the rules are transparent, property rights are stable, and long-term returns can be verified.

This painful awareness of rules and birth was something Teacher James felt earlier than anyone. That little boy standing outside the glass window, gazing in, was himself in his childhood. He stood outside the Xin Beiping restaurant on Zhonghua Road in Taipei, watching the people inside eat potstickers and drink soy milk, with only one question in his heart: why do they have money, and our family does not?

Back then on Zhonghua Road, at Xin Beiping, people were eating potstickers, drinking soy milk, eating dumplings, and I would wonder who those people inside were. For us, a single meal might eat up my father’s entire monthly salary. It turned out we were laborers and they were capitalists; that was just how it was. So at that time I resolved that I must have money, and I would have money. So you too, all the same, will have money. (Video 00451)

Later, Teacher James founded CLEC, and selflessly passed on the method of escaping the class divide to many students.