To Be a Lawyer, Doctor, or Programmer—Life’s First Step Is Always Calculating

Whatever you want to become—whether a lawyer, accountant, doctor, teacher, or programmer—no matter if you aim to live in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, or Chongqing—the first step is always to run the numbers. For instance, if you're considering a finance or accounting major at a particular school, you need to find out where most of that school's graduates actually end up. Take your test score and create five or six placeholder applications. Maybe School A's computer science program, School B's finance program, School C's media program, School D's...... Put together a list of schools whose programs you feel your score could realistically get you into. Then what? You need to dig into where the last few graduating classes from those specific programs have gone—what companies they've landed jobs at. This is non-negotiable. Get your parents to tap their network of relatives and friends to help you find this out. Next, talk to people already working in those industries to understand the median lifestyle of professionals in those roles: What city tier are they in—first-tier, second-tier, or third-tier? Where do peers typically find jobs most easily? What does entry-level pay look like, and what does compensation look like after ten years? What are the promotion paths and career advancement trajectories? You need to understand all of this. If you search the data, you'll notice a city's housing prices correlate closely with the number of publicly listed companies there. The logic is straightforward: some cities have much more active capital markets, and how people make money varies wildly. Someone whose wealth comes from capital markets—for example, through a company going public, followed by near-zero-cost share unlocking—will have a completely different financial reality than you, whose income likely comes from grinding out a salary, penny by penny, skimping on lunch money. If you two went house hunting together, how could you possibly compete with them? Get it? Their money just blows in on the wind.