How to Raise a Successful Child

Essentially, this is a cultivation-style game. The protagonist has four dimensions: basic attributes, knowledge points, experience and skills, and equipment—or "ecological niche." Only when all four dimensions are combined can you form a complete profile of a person. You may not be a hexagonal warrior, but at least you'll have a solid quadrilateral.

Basic attributes are almost entirely innate, much like character creation in a game—whatever you roll is what you get.

Some people are diligent, others lazy. Some are ambitious, others lack drive. Some are quick-witted, others slow. Some have excellent memories, others are dull.

These are all innate basic attributes.

Can they change? Yes, but not through education—rather, through extreme situations.

Take Gaoyao from the drama *Myth*. He started as a kind, cheerful chef and the protagonist's brother-in-law, and they time-traveled together to the Qin Dynasty.

Initially, he was genuinely kind, saving the protagonist and caring for those around him.

But no one appreciated it. And he was extremely unfortunate: while the protagonist returned to modern times to become a general, Gaoyao was castrated after time-traveling back.

Then came endless torture, pushed to the brink of death again and again. Like orange trees north of the Huai River turning into bitter trifoliate oranges, he darkened to adapt and survive—and became the historical figure Zhao Gao.

You'll see how drastically a person's personality can change.

Here's a thought experiment: take ten thousand ordinary people, put them in WWII concentration camps, torture them daily in extreme ways—survivors pass, the rest are eliminated. The few who survive would have personalities utterly unlike their original selves. Released afterward, they'd likely become ruthless characters, completely different from their initially timid selves.

Similarly, grab ten thousand successful people, strand them on a desert island to herd sheep with no contact, for 30 years. After 30 years, those who still lament like Liu Bei—touching the flesh on his thighs, sighing that time flies and old age approaches while achievements remain unmade—would be the rare exception.

So let's look at *Joy of Life*, specifically the protagonist Fan Xian.

Almost every big shot in the show is connected to his father—either biological, godfather, father-in-law, master, or his mother's former subordinate. Across the four nations in the drama, anyone with status is dead set on protecting Fan Xian. It's like the permanent five securing your cultivation—there's no bigger educational resource than this.

Even so, what's the decisive factor?

Ultimately, it's still Fan Xian's own personality.

Personality is like the iron content in iron ore—you need actual iron to smelt in the first place.

If you throw a brick into a high-temperature steel furnace, what do you get? It melts down.

So personality isn't shaped by education—it changes under immense pressure, altering its molecular structure.

Under pressures exceeding 150,000 atmospheres, coal has a chance to become a diamond. Castrate enough Gaoyaos and torture them relentlessly, and some will become Zhao Gaos. Throw enough leeks into the market, and most will become leek boxes—but an exceptional few will become stock market gods.

Now let's look at the second dimension: knowledge points.

In *Joy of Life*, Fan Xian is taught poison-making, martial arts, various conspiracies, and as a time-traveler, he possesses modern knowledge. All of these are knowledge points.

But more knowledge isn't always better. Why?

Because life is finite. As Zhuangzi said: "My life has its limits, but knowledge does not. Pursuing the infinite with the finite leads to exhaustion."

It's not whoever has the richest knowledge base who succeeds. So if you spend all your time accumulating knowledge, you'll find it futile.

But that doesn't mean you can afford to have none.

Knowledge points work in an interesting way: you only realize how little you know when you need it. If you never get the chance to use it, you've wasted your time for nothing. But if you need it and don't have it, you can't learn it on the fly—and you'll miss the opportunity.

Some people prosper, others falter. The former aren't necessarily more knowledgeable than the latter. But whatever the successful ones needed to use in their lifetime, they happened to have learned it—and wasted nothing. Meanwhile, the unsuccessful ones never got the chance to use what they knew.

It's like having cards in hand but needing the right moment to play them.

But that's essentially all education covers—at least the majority of it.

Because education primarily focuses on knowledge points.

The third dimension is experience and skills.

In plain terms, it's about practice—applying what you've learned. You only gain experience by using it, and only through experience can skills form.

Look at fresh graduates writing "proficient in C language" on their resumes.

That's almost never true. As students, you've merely studied C language—you need to participate in real projects to gain experience.

Whether you can turn experience into skill doesn't depend entirely on your effort.

It depends on what kind of projects you get to join. A 10-billion project and a 1-million project are worlds apart.

In *Joy of Life*, the efforts to cultivate Fan Xian were relentless: negotiations, catching spies, princely power struggles, diplomatic missions to enemy states, then managing the imperial treasury and running the spy network back home.

All of this is about giving him projects to grind experience.

Why does Wang Qinian seem like a seasoned slacker? Is he not smart enough? Not necessarily. He might even be smarter than Fan Xian, perhaps hiding his ambitions. But that doesn't matter—he knows those opportunities aren't for him.

All he can do is provide exchange value.

His goal is to find a promising boss like Fan Xian, offer utility value, pick a side, and avoid being dropped mid-journey or made a scapegoat.

This requires enormous energy and emotional toll.

Because without the protagonist halo, easy opportunities won't come to you. The chances you can grab are usually as perilous as Wei Xiaobao entering the palace in *The Deer and the Cauldron*—nine deaths for every one life.

And if you're lucky enough to survive, you still have to guard against others stealing your credit—so you need to plan your next move in advance.

As they say, a person's greatest value isn't what they've done, but what they can still do.

If you want to cash in on your past achievements, you must become indispensable in the next round—and you need to have calculated that before stepping into the game in the first place.

Doing all this obviously isn't just about gaining experience to build skills. Because these are auxiliary—not central.

What's central? The ecological niche. Claiming a niche is like leveling up and looting gear in a game. This is the fourth dimension.

Think of *Empresses in the Palace*—those concubines who are main-position consorts, each ruling her own palace. Meanwhile, rankless ladies,常 in (Changzai), and 答应 (Dayi) all live in others' palaces, subject to their control.

In *Joy of Life*, the Crown Prince and the Second Prince both fight fiercely, yet neither is particularly skilled in martial arts—why?

Because they already hold the main-position ecological niche. They can recruit top-tier (9th rank) experts.

How many years would it take them to personally reach 9th-rank mastery?

By the same logic, 9th-rank experts without an ecological niche must sell their skills, trading them to princes in exchange for protection.

Chen Pingping letting Fan Xian run the spy network, and Fan Jian placing him in charge of the imperial treasury—both are about building his ecological niche.

You can think of an ecological niche as a type of equipment.

Your defense might only be 20, but once you equip the Soft猬 Armor (+780 defense), your total jumps to 800.

In the drama, if Fan Xian didn't control the imperial treasury, he'd be nobody. But with it, he commands millions of small-to-medium merchants and tens of millions of jobs.

Now consider the weight of that. That's what an ecological niche means.

Think about it.

All four dimensions together make up the cultivation game you need to play.

You'll notice this is completely different from what teachers told you as kids, right?

Because the imperial examination system was fundamentally designed to keep smart people from going astray, forcing them to spend their lives studying classics to exhaustion. Meanwhile, Western education was built to mass-produce workers, standardize them, and boost factory efficiency.

So they told you: just score five points higher than your deskmate and you'll be fine.

They weren't lying to you—scoring five points more is necessary. But it's far from enough, because reality is a four-dimensional arena where you compete on all fronts.