# The 35-Year-Old Crisis Was Determined by Your Decision at 25

Everyone says the Chinese workplace is unfriendly to young people, and by 35, nobody wants you anymore. Is that true? There are two types of people in the workplace: those whose paths keep widening, and those whose paths keep narrowing—have you ever thought about what determines which category you fall into?

Many people might say emotional intelligence, hard work, and things like that. Are they important? Yes, but have you considered that some people's destinies are actually predetermined from the beginning?

When you choose a job, a business, or an industry, what's the most critical consideration? People will say income or salary, as if suggesting anything else is manipulation, as if it means you have bad intentions—because the only pie that matters is the one you can eat right now.

What I'm trying to say is that businesses, jobs, industries, and business models all inherently contain "scalability." What does that mean? It means when you choose to enter an industry, select a position, join a company, or pick a certain business model, you need to consider their inherent scalability. The current income is just one point, but as you progress, can you horizontally gain opportunities to do more things? What high-value people and matters can you access? What personal achievements or work can you create, so that in the next stage you can leverage these to earn even higher income?

These are all critical, but people only look at immediate income, and it's easy to overlook these hidden factors. For example, abandoning a more promising company in a high-growth industry to take a leisurely position at a relative's company, because the relative will give you an extra 1,000 or 2,000 yuan per month out of family obligation. Or having the opportunity to transfer to a more challenging position where you can meet wealthier people, but turning it down because you're unfamiliar with the new work content and your current job feels easier. These kinds of situations are countless.

Honestly, I don't quite understand—what can an extra one or two thousand yuan per month do? Improve your quality of life? Can't you lower your quality of life a bit and think more about future "possibilities"? What we want is not to always linger at the bottom, earning an extra one or two thousand per month so we can eat a few more bowls of spicy hotpot and add a few more chicken legs. We want the day when we don't have to earn 3,000 or 5,000 yuan per month anymore—we want 20,000, 30,000, or even more.

Is this drawing a false picture? I'm not your boss, I have no reason to deceive you. I'm just saying, using the example above: take a leisurely position, earn an extra 2,000 per month out of family obligation—what can you do after you get laid off? What are your works? What can you write on your resume? "I poured tea for leaders at this company every day and brought the company 30 million yuan in revenue"? So-called 35-year-old crisis—isn't that when you get laid off and can't even compete with fresh graduates? So ultimately, who created this situation?

I chose to enter the cryptocurrency field because I saw that it will inevitably become a very important financial infrastructure in the future. Because of its fundamental nature, its efficiency—it's blown traditional finance full of holes. You can't say that most cryptocurrencies can only be used for speculation right now, therefore they're not worth investing in. That's wrong. Cryptocurrency's replacement of traditional finance is inevitable; it's just a matter of time. And precisely because the industry is still in its infrastructure-building phase, I'm willing to dedicate myself to it, because from my perspective, there's still a very long dividend period ahead, giving me enough time to accumulate without needing to switch industries.

So what's many people's crisis? It's choosing wrong from the very beginning, misjudging the value of "opportunities" and "possibilities" from the start. Why did Meituan, after doing group buying and then food delivery, suddenly make e-commerce giants lose sleep? If Alibaba hadn't happened to have acquired Eleme, Meituan probably would have already stolen most of Alibaba's core business. Because Wang Xing saw that the bottom layer of all these things is the same: getting the right things to people who need them at the right time. It doesn't matter whether it's offline, e-commerce, or delivery—the form isn't important.

So what are you doing? Driving for Didi, delivering food, working as a server at McDonald's or KFC, or just doing shopping errands for a few familiar neighbors, opening a small corner store by your door. Can you make money? Enough to get by, yes. But if you do these things for a lifetime, that's all they'll ever be, because they have almost zero "scalability." Everyone says AI technology has come and stolen white-collar jobs; community group buying has stolen street vendors' jobs; autonomous driving and unmanned delivery have stolen Didi drivers' and food delivery workers' jobs—it's because the things they're doing are fundamentally stagnant. There's no connection between them and other more valuable things.

So why do some people, as they keep working, naturally derive new businesses and new possibilities, reaching a higher level? It's not because this person is inherently super talented. It's because what he's doing has deep fundamental roots. When he keeps digging deeper, the deeper he goes, the more he can see other valuable things that share the same underlying foundation with what he's currently doing. So he naturally expands his business, expands his social circles, expands his resources—this is extremely smooth, requiring no deliberate effort. It's only because he keeps digging deeper into what he's doing that these opportunities automatically emerge.

Whereas other people are doing things with very shallow roots—it's dead water. They can't dig any deeper, and they can't expand anything from it either. This is the fundamental reason for being eliminated. It seems like a black swan event caused by technological progress, but actually the outcome was determined from the initial choice—the only difference is whether it happens at 35, 40, or 45 years old. $BTC ‌#Gate广场AI测评官