The old saying that "a gentleman loves wealth and has a way to get it", that is to say, a gentleman, like ordinary people, also has a pursuit of money and wealth, but no matter how much he yearns for this wealth, he will still be very cautious about the way to obtain money, and will obtain money through a very legitimate way, rather than some improper means, but what is the specific way?
In fact, we can find the answer to this question through the study of the lives of the ancients, and this is the true meaning of "taking history as a mirror, we can know the rise and fall". Zeng Guofan, who was known as "the first of the four famous ministers of ZTE" in the late Qing Dynasty, his life is a very typical process from poor to rich, and according to what he said to his relatives in his family letter, we can summarize that even if he is poor at the moment, as long as he is willing to spend money in these 3 aspects, then he can eventually get rich.
The first aspect is to be willing to spend money for one's own mind, Zhuge Liang said in the "Book of Commandments": "Learning must be quiet, only then must be learned", learning needs to calm down, and the acquisition of talent requires a lot of study, but learning is not just to calm down, it sometimes needs to pay money, for example, Zeng Guofan in 1836, because he failed to participate in the examination, so he decided to go back to his hometown in Hunan.
In that era, the traffic was very underdeveloped, so Zeng Guofan first went to Nanjing, Jiangsu, and then turned to The Xiang River back to Hunan, and it was also in Nanjing that he saw a set of "Twenty-Four Histories", which he liked but was very expensive, and finally he sold his clothes to buy this set of books, read at least twenty pages every day, so he made great progress in his studies and finally succeeded in the entrance examination.
The second aspect is to be willing to spend money for their friends, especially those who are kind of kind to themselves, there is a saying called "friends have more roads to walk", willing to help their friends, so that their life path can naturally go wider and wider, and spend money on those friends who have helped themselves, that is a more intuitive expression of emotion, reflecting that they have a basic sense of gratitude, when necessary in the future, you can let yourself get more help.
Zeng Guofan in 1838 after the examination of the jinshi, for a long time in the capital as a relatively "noble" official, the so-called Qinggui is to say that the official position is very important, but at the same time the salary is not very high, that is to say, Zeng Guofan in the capital for a long time income is not very high, but it is in this case, he still spent a lot of money for his Hunan compatriots, the same list of jinshi, and even wrote a letter to go home to borrow a hundred and two silver for this purpose, so that some friends can survive the difficult days, Later, most of these people also became the backbone members of the Xiang Army.
The third aspect is to be willing to spend money for his family, even when he was extremely difficult, Zeng Guofan still did not forget to instruct his father and grandfather to pay money to some of the relatives and elders of his clan on time every year (this money is of course his own), and for his brothers and nephews in his family, he spent a lot of money wholeheartedly, helping his brother to hire teachers, providing him with shelter and food, and so on.
It is precisely because Zeng Guofan attaches great importance to his family and drives his family to progress together while making progress, so in the end there is the blessing of the Zeng family that has lasted for a hundred years, and he himself is also with the help of many brothers to achieve the merits of the Xiang Army.