For children from ordinary families, the only main focus in the first half of their lives is to accumulate their own survival capital. Don't waste your energy on love, face, emotions, and ineffective socializing too early The most important thing for children from ordinary families is to quickly see the main line of their lives. You should know that the most important thing in the first half of your life is not to have a passionate relationship, not to make everyone look up to you, not to maintain a seemingly respectable life, and not to waste a lot of time and energy on emotions and ineffective socializing. The only real thing you should do in life is to accumulate your own survival capital. What is survival capital? Simply put, it is something that can prevent you from falling into a slump in the future, even if you encounter unemployment, illness, marital upheaval, or major economic problems. For example, your abilities, education, professional knowledge, work experience, earning ability, cash deposits, asset accumulation, effective network, and so on. And most importantly, your ability to start over in this society. These things are the true confidence of a child from an ordinary family. What is the biggest difference between children from ordinary families and those from privileged families? You don't have anything to inherit from your native family. You don't have a rich family fortune, a strong network of relationships, and your parents don't have the ability to help you solve problems with millions of dollars at any time. The vast majority of things in your life have to be earned bit by bit by yourself. So your life tasks are different from those of children born into wealthy families from the beginning. Children from good backgrounds start to enjoy the accumulated capital of their families from the moment they are born. Their life mission may be to live well, inherit family property, and enjoy life. What about children from ordinary families? The most important task in the first half of life is to accumulate one's first bucket of capital. In other words, in the first half of life, others can enjoy life, but you must first establish a life. This is also a mistake that many children from ordinary families often make. Because information is so advanced now, you can see everything through various channels such as short videos. Many people from poor backgrounds envy others for their wonderful lives, so they start pursuing these things in the latter half of their lives too early. When they don't have a stable income or much money, they are particularly concerned about face and pursue high consumption. They spend a lot of time on emotional entanglements and various ineffective social interactions before they have accumulated any assets. Their life may seem lively, but after a few years, only chicken feathers remain on the ground. Wages have not increased, abilities have not improved, deposits have not increased, and assets have not increased at all. The only thing that has grown is age. This is the scariest thing about ordinary people. It's not that you haven't put in the effort, but you have put in a lot of effort. You may even work harder than others, but your efforts have gone in the wrong direction and haven't truly accumulated. The most precious thing for young people is not money, but time. Money is gone, you can still earn it; The job is gone, you can still look for it again; If the business fails, you can start over from scratch. But once time passes, it will never come back. So, people from ordinary families should do the most when they are young. It is to devote all one's time and energy as much as possible to things that can form long-term accumulation. What is something that can form long-term accumulation? For example, learning truly useful skills, choosing jobs that can accumulate experience, training one's earning ability, saving money, establishing one's own influence, building effective networks, credit endorsements, and so on. These are slow but require long-term persistence. You may not see any immediate results, but in 5 or 10 years, when you look again, you will find that they have become your biggest personal moat. And those things that have not accumulated, even if you invest a lot of time and money, will not leave any trace as time goes by. You play games every day, very well, but ten years later, no one plays these games anymore, they won't bring you anything; You watch TV dramas and news every day, watching a lot, but ten years later these things have no effect on you at all; You gather and eat with friends from the same bottom every day, but these friends don't bring you any opportunities; You talk about an unforgettable relationship that has been painful for several years, but ten years later, this relationship has no purpose except for leaving some memories. However, if you learned a skill ten years ago, saved some money, entered a new industry, or started a side job, these things will definitely affect your life and enhance the true thickness and support of your life. So where to put the saved money determines whether you are saving or standing still. The 500 companies in the S&P 500 are carrying the best business in the United States. Buying one is equivalent to using the saved money to buy a small piece of profit from these five hundred companies. They hire, price, collect, and profit globally, and the index returns to your account. The few hours you don't have to work, they are working for you. This is the second level of leverage that ordinary people can obtain. The first layer is your own time, and the second layer is the money you have saved. This is the same as what you heard earlier. What kind of effort is considered accumulation, and only those who can withstand the screening are considered. The S&P 500 undergoes personnel changes every year, with those who fall behind being kicked out and those who run out being added. You don't have to judge which company will win, this mechanism makes judgments for you. If left for long enough, it will grow into the thickest asset in your hand. So, the most important thing in an ordinary person's life is not to live each day with excitement and liveliness, but to leave something behind in each day. What a person from an ordinary family should truly establish in the first half of their life is their own survival capital. You don't need to prove how happy or respectable you are, how many people you know, or how much you enjoy life. Your true main theme is to gradually transform yourself from a person without capital to one with capital, and use your best 10 or 20 years to accumulate your original capital. When you have the capital to survive, you can talk about love, life, ideals, and freedom. At this time, you will meet more and better people or things.