My dad taught me one thing in his life: as long as a person keeps hustling, there’s always a way out.
When he was young, he learned blacksmithing, thinking it was a trade he could live on for the rest of his life. Then machines took over, and handmade ironwork slowly lost its market. He went into pig farming and ran into swine fever—the sows were gone; later, the village wouldn’t allow pig farming anymore. He made money crushing feed for others, then taught himself masonry and went to work on construction sites. Nobody wanted to take him on, so he figured it out himself. I remember, around junior high, before SARS, he went to Dongguan to work. The steel scaffolding on the site was incredibly high—he said his legs shook standing up there, but he gritted his teeth and held on.
My dad never made big money in his life, but he never stopped looking for a way out.
Later I watched the TV series Old Uncle. Cui Guoming was the same kind of person. A graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, an engineer—after being laid off, he sang in nightclubs, sold eyeglasses, wrote wuxia novels, speculated on stamps. He tried every money-making path and took every fall. He hustled his whole life and never got rich in the end. But when he left, the four children he’d raised had all grown into decent people, the friends he’d helped all came to see him off, and even the old factory director who’d once looked down on him said: this man never did a single dishonest thing in his life.
My dad wasn’t as legendary as Old Uncle, but they were the same kind of people: they never expected to pick the right road on the first try, but they never allowed themselves to stop on a dead-end road.
So I’ve never worried about not being able to make money. If a road doesn’t work, take another; if you don’t know something, learn it from scratch. Hustling doesn’t guarantee you’ll win, but at least it keeps you in the game.
This is probably the most valuable wealth my dad left me.