Two Types of People in the World
There are only two kinds of people in this world: those with assets (the true aristocracy) and those who work for a living (the commoners).
Asset owners all live off their capital. The other group lives off their labor—the kind of labor that includes both physical and mental effort.
Within the vast majority of these laborers, there’s a so-called hierarchy—rich, middle class, poor—which is mostly a scheme to manipulate people. The asset owners define the game, letting the rest of us spend our savings to add bricks to their wealth.
The so-called aristocracy isn’t that mysterious—it’s just a bunch of rent-seekers who do no work, living comfortably off other people’s labor for generations. If you truly want to join this most decadent and declining class, you should choose the right path.
For example, invest in Ivy League schools and become a board member, rather than falling for the hype from study-abroad agencies, buying school-district housing, purchasing exam qualifications, or investing in overseas education. That would be as absurd as thinking buying an LV bag will make you an aristocrat. LV’s owner is old money. If you really want to become an aristocrat, you need to figure out how to acquire the LV brand, take control of the company, and collect its profits passively—rather than throwing away your money buying its products. If you do, you’ll be fooled, played, and continue to add bricks to that aristocratic family’s empire.
Expecting to spend a fortune at a huge premium on a handbag, or to spend a fortune to attend Yale, is consumption—not investment. You need to understand equity. You must become a capital owner, not a consumer. That’s the only way to achieve what you desire.
If you’re a top student, theoretically you’re the closest person in your family to meeting the basic conditions for a turnaround. You should push yourself, rather than hoping your children will inherit your genius genes and surpass even you.
That’s unrealistic.
You need to seize this prime time when you’re exceptionally talented and rapidly transition from labor to capital, squeezing your way into that one-in-ten-thousand aristocracy.
From then on, your children won’t compete on exam scores—they’ll compete on resource integration capabilities (no longer fighting for scraps among millions).
Resources are what you prepare for your children. You should equip them with the money to acquire LV, not the money to buy from it. You should prepare the funds to invest in Ivy League schools and join the board of directors, not the money to study abroad at them.
If you spend all your meager millions as a middle-class family, send your child abroad to polish their resume, and they return with no family business to inherit—still working for others at low wages, unable to recoup the educational investment—you’ll be working hard on the wrong path and deeply regret it later.
What you should actually do is shift your family’s source of income from labor to capital. Don’t expect to somehow keep competing from scratch among millions of people, getting stronger generation after generation within a game someone else defined.
That’s impossible.