From “Discourses on Salt and Iron”: Wealth lies in strategy, not in physical labor

The two-thousand-year-old iron law of wealth: Your diligence might be destroying you.

A cognitive shock across time and space, the “Discourses on Salt and Iron” pierces through the illusion of agricultural civilization:

“Wealth comes from strategic thinking, not physical toil; profit stems from positioning, not from laborious farming.”

Two thousand years later, this statement still strikes at contemporary society:

While you’re packed like sardines in the subway, someone is harvesting traffic with algorithms.

While you’re staying up late revising PowerPoints, someone is locking up industry lifelines with equity designs.

This isn’t unfair fate—it’s a “generational cognitive crushing.”

1. Cognitive Devastation: Diligence is the greatest cognitive shackle.

In an office building at 3 AM, a post-90s designer named Xiao Lin revises her proposal for the 28th time.

She always believed “the harder you work, the luckier you get,” yet during a physical exam, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

This is the collective predicament of modern “laborers”: using tactical diligence to mask strategic laziness.

Three illusions about labor value

  1. Time illusion: Believing “time invested = value created,” when 90% of busyness is just filling holes in the system.
    • The “yield-per-acre mentality” of agricultural times, where sweat directly correlated with harvest.
  2. Physical effort illusion: Faith in “heaven rewards the diligent,” while ignoring that machines can work fields 24 hours without rest.
    • The “working hours trap” of the industrial age, mechanical repetition on assembly lines.
  3. Moral illusion: Self-gratification through the “virtue of diligence,” concealing the truth of strategic laziness.
    • The “involution predicament” of the information age, ineffective labor like “building rockets with PowerPoint.”

When you boast about working year-round without breaks, capitalists are calculating your surplus value conversion rate.

The more diligent the assembly line cog, the more gleefully the industrial revolution’s winch turns.

Redefining “labor value”

  • Physical labor layer: Delivery riders earning ¥6 per order (time density determines the ceiling), low-tier effort, exchanging physical labor for survival materials, e.g., delivery riders, assembly line workers.

  • Mental arbitrage layer: A rider trainer developing route optimization courses (amplifying per-unit time value 100 times), mid-tier effort, exchanging brainpower for means of production, e.g., programmers, designers.

  • System building layer: Designing the order distribution algorithm for delivery platforms (creating trillion-yuan business ecosystems), high-tier effort, harvesting ecosystem dividends through rules, e.g., platform architects, standard-setters.

Why do programmers face a crisis at 35?

Because they remain at the “code laborer” level, never mastering the ability to shape “technological positioning.”

The real moat isn’t writing code, but designing the rules of the code world.

2. Strategic Awakening: From “being governed by algorithms” to “designing algorithms.”

The essence of wealth is arbitrage

  • Spatial arbitrage: 15th-century Venetian merchants transporting spices, 21st-century ByteDance transporting attention.

  • Temporal arbitrage: Buffett’s “be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful,” Musk betting on the future by colonizing Mars.

  • Cognitive arbitrage: Mastering 10% of key information to leverage 90% of resource misallocations.

The bottom tier competes with physical strength, the middle with brainpower, the top plays with probability.

You’ll never earn money beyond your cognitive coordinate system, except by luck—and money earned by luck will be lost through incompetence.

Xiao Mei, a post-90s girl from Hangzhou, achieved an astonishing transformation in three years:

  1. Stage 1: Taobao customer service (¥5,000 monthly salary, answering 200 “Are you there?” messages daily)
  2. Stage 2: Organizing frequent questions → creating automated response templates (tripling efficiency)
  3. Stage 3: Developing an intelligent customer service system sold to small and medium businesses (annual income of ¥3 million)

Her breakthrough code: packaging repetitive labor into replicable digital products—this is the modern version of “strategic thinking.”

Building a personal algorithm system

Input ports:

  • Consuming 3 hours of high-density information daily (industry reports > bestsellers > short videos)
  • Establishing a “hidden knowledge” hunting network (closed-door meetings > community mingling > scrolling moments)

Processing kernel:

  • Using “Bayesian thinking” to iterate cognition (prior probability + new evidence = upgraded decisions)
  • Creating “transferable models” (abstracting food delivery experience into route optimization methodology)

Output engines:

  • Making results replicable (developing courses/writing operation manuals/building SOP processes)
  • Making value leverageable (equity financing/resource attraction through IP/ecological positioning through patents)

Why can’t most people learn strategic thinking?

Because schools teach “taking exams,” while reality demands “creating exam questions.”

The former involves internal competition under established rules, the latter dominates through rule reconstruction.

3. Positional Thinking: Finding your place in the cracks of order.

Laws of potential energy accumulation, understanding the “ecological niche warfare.”

  • Hidden rule 1: All blue oceans exist in the capillaries of red oceans (Pinduoduo rising from “beyond-5th-ring-road demands”)

  • Hidden rule 2: The more prominent the head effect, the more anti-fragile opportunities at the tail (when 1% of media giants fall, 4% of vertical accounts devour the market)

  • Hidden rule 3: Compliance risks often hide the greatest dividends (early Bitcoin players/cross-border e-commerce tax havens)

In high society, people elevate each other; in lower society, people step on each other; the middle class pretends to help each other.

High-profit, low-competition opportunities hide in cyclical time lags; opportunities are trapped in cognitive blind spots.

The three realms of breakthrough thinkers

First realm, seeing the game: seizing information highlands.

  • Join 3 quality paid communities, recommended top “Knowledge Planet” circles
  • Follow 10 niche domain KOLs, be wary of million-follower influencers, focus on vertical experts

Second realm, utilizing the game: weaving resource networks.

  • Develop “weak connection links,” meet one new industry practitioner weekly
  • Build a “value exchange mechanism,” trading your professional skills for others’ resources

Third realm, reconstructing the game: catching cyclical rhythms.

  • Economic cycles: learn skills in bear markets, monetize in bull markets, like learning short video creation in 2018 and exploding in 2020
  • Industry cycles: entering during digital transformation periods of traditional industries, like brick-and-mortar stores going live-streaming

A Meituan rider studying platform algorithms is making tactical-level effort; Wang Xing designing those algorithms is making strategic-level dimensional reduction.

Cognitive dimension gaps create the most powerful dimensional attacks.

4. Warning: Don’t fall into these “pseudo-strategy” pitfalls.

Three toxic logics of success studies

  1. Attribution fallacy: Packaging era dividends as personal methodologies.
  2. Survivorship bias: Using 1% of counterattack cases to mask 99% of casualties.
  3. Causal inversion: Preaching “persistence leads to success,” while never mentioning that choice is 100 times more important than persistence.

Masters teaching financial freedom look suspiciously like casino dealers demonstrating guaranteed winning techniques.

When knowledge payment sells “shortcuts,” the real shortcuts have already been priced astronomically.

The deadly allure of financial strategies

  • First layer illusion: Believing K-line charts have patterns to follow, when high-frequency trading algorithms are playing quantum poker.
  • Second layer illusion: Believing “value investing” is worry-free (CATL lost 60% of market value in one year).
  • Third layer illusion: Imagining yourself as the sickle, when you’re merely the spark from two sickles colliding.

Why do most people lose money learning value investing?

Because Buffett isn’t buying stocks, he’s buying the Fed’s money-printing rights;

Ordinary investors are playing national currency games with grocery shopping mindsets.

5. Ultimate Breakthrough: As AI begins to replace “strategies,” redefining human value in the AI era.

Humanity’s final three sanctuaries

  1. Pain alchemy—transforming setbacks into cognitive leaps, like Chu Shijian starting an orange business at 74 and recreating his legend.
  2. Meaning magic—creating collective faith in the void, the secret behind Zibo barbecue and temple economy booms.
  3. Deep empathy—understanding humanity’s darkest desires.

AI can deconstruct all logic, yet cannot calculate the irrationality deep in human hearts;

The future’s scarcest resource isn’t knowledge, but the ability to infuse knowledge with soul.

When ChatGPT can write an 80-point solution, the real winner isn’t the person competing with it on speed, but the one who can ask 101-point questions.

Humanity’s final bastion lies in the ability to ask questions.

6. Conclusion: Kill your “diligent self.”

Two thousand years ago, Sang Hongyang already prophesied:

“The fate of laborers is to be priced by strategists.”

While you burn your life away at your workstation,

Someone is designing new game rules with the value you create.

Remember these three blood-red truths:

  1. Labor cannot bring wealth, only the way labor is distributed can.
  2. Working desperately won’t change fate, reconstructing the dimensions of desperation will.
  3. Knowledge isn’t power; cognitive weaponization of knowledge is.

Standing at the threshold of the AI revolution, we finally understand the profound meaning of “Discourses on Salt and Iron”:

True “strategy” isn’t calculation, but cognitive dimensional ascension;

The ultimate “positioning” isn’t plunder, but ecosystem co-building.

From this moment on,

Forget “diligence,” begin “designing diligence.”

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