Odébier thought that if he went fast enough, poverty would never catch up to him. But what he didn’t know was that it wasn’t him who was poor—it was the path he had chosen.

Only when density and scale reach a certain level can you drive competition to new heights. Do you think someone earning 60,000 can pay a higher price, or someone earning 40,000? Whether you engage in cutthroat competition isn't up to you — it's determined by the people around you.

Traveling all the way to Shanghai to sell coffee, working over a dozen hours a day, and making less than 5,000 a month — can you really save any money? Money earned in one place gets spent there; not a single yuan makes it back home. By the time you're too worn out to keep going, riddled with health problems, and forced to return to your hometown, your kids will just repeat the same打工 cycle. Is there any real accumulation here? This kind of rat race simply doesn't yield returns.

Is this the life you want?

Our urbanization is essentially complete. The next phase is city differentiation — only a handful of large, comprehensive cities will thrive, while the rest will follow divergent paths, categorized by their tier.

Once your personal direction clashes with a city's trajectory, it's fundamentally the same as a misalignment between your career goals and a company's direction — and that mismatch will create significant headaches for both you and your family's future.