Don’t invest money you’ve earned through hard work.

If you were the class monitor.

Would you assign those grueling tasks to your close buddies, or to classmates you're not particularly close to?

Obviously the latter, because you never side with outsiders over your own people.

Working for a client, you hand off all the risky, scout-like assignments to vendors, like sending them out as guinea pigs.

Before the weekend ends, you round them up and fake an urgent directive: this is critical, big shots will review it next Monday. Please work overtime over the weekend and get the DEMO ready for review first thing Monday morning.

Then you go on vacation while the vendors do the work.

Would you make your own brothers suffer? No. You'd have them steal the credit.

When the vendors finish the work Monday, your buddies present it, show off in front of leadership, and claim the reward.

You say that without your diligent supervision and oversight, those vendors would never have delivered so fast......

This is human nature—us versus them. If you don't offer some sweetness, who'll follow you later?

If you make the brothers who follow you suffer, you'll feel uneasy. You'll worry no one will follow you anymore, leading to command errors.

If you make those vendor派遣人员 suffer, you won't feel uneasy. Commonly put: I only want results, I don't care about casualty counts.

How to pacify their subordinates is the vendor bosses' own business, not yours. The client spends the vendor's manpower and budget, using them as guinea pigs.

So money is the same. The money looks the same, but its weight in your heart differs—us versus them.

The money you earned through hard work comes with emotional attachment, making it hard to risk.

If you risk it, you'll feel an intense sense of gain and loss.

Of course, if you don't have such a strong sense of gain and loss, that's better. Nurhaci valued Manchus far above Han Chinese. Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng gradually淡化了满汉之分, which is ideological progress. Nurhaci was an entrepreneur who lived and died with his Manchurian brothers. He couldn't help but have brotherly bonds, impossible to treat them equally to Han Chinese who surrendered later.

Later Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng never shared the experience of钻过深山老林 together.

They were successors. In their view, Manchus were tools too, Han Chinese were tools too.

Since both are tools, why distinguish so clearly, elevate one and suppress the other? Old tools would grow lazy, new tools would lack enthusiasm......

As tools, money has no us-or-them distinction.