Learning Rate Equals Return Rate: Raising a Growth Fund, Not a Depreciating Asset

Hello everyone, I am the Financial Veteran from the Finsages “AI Era Education Transformation” column.

Today I want to start with a simple arithmetic problem.

One yuan, growing at 10% per year – what does it become after thirty years?

The answer is 17.4 yuan.

Now take that same one yuan, shrinking by 10% each year for thirty years.

It becomes only 0.42 yuan.

Same starting point, same thirty years. One multiplies seventeen times. The other shrinks to less than pocket change. That is the power of compounding. And that is the terror of depreciation.

In my thirty years of bank risk control, the two types of assets that frightened me most were, first, overvalued bubble assets, and second, legacy assets that quietly depreciate while their owner remains completely unaware.

Today I want to ask you a serious question: have you ever considered that your child’s diploma is actually a depreciating legacy asset?

**Love and guidance are more important than grades.**

I have seen this scenario too many times.

A child studies from an early age. His parents give him their full support. More than a decade of effort, all focused on a single goal – passing the college entrance examination. The day the admission letter arrives, the whole family celebrates. The parents breathe a long sigh of relief and say a sentence that countless families have uttered:

“Finally, you’ve made it through the hard part. Now you can relax and enjoy yourself.”

That sentence comes from love, and it is beyond reproach. But behind it lies a judgment – a very dangerous judgment: that learning is a race with a finish line. Once you pass the exam, you have won, and you can stop.

Reality is far crueller.

Research shows that in today’s environment of extremely rapid knowledge renewal, the core knowledge in many professional fields has a half‑life of no more than five years. That means half of what you know today in engineering, medicine, finance, or the internet could be outdated or even wrong in just five years.

A diploma records the stock of knowledge you possessed at a certain point in the past. But the era never stops moving for anyone’s legacy assets.

A piece of paper depreciates. Curiosity does not.

**Follow the child’s nature, and the child will naturally shine.**

There is a true story I remember very clearly.

When I was working in the head office credit department, two young men joined the bank at the same time. Let me call them A Dong and A Xi. They started from nearly the same point – similar educational backgrounds, similar professional abilities.

Five years later, a gap began to appear.

A Dong was a person with a “finish‑line mindset.” He believed that once he had entered the bank, passed the professional exams, and secured a stable position, he could take it easy. In his spare time, he played video games and watched TV series. He occasionally showed up for internal training but never took the initiative to read or follow industry trends. He once said something that stuck with me: “Our profession will never be out of work anyway. Why learn so much?”

A Xi was different. He had a habit of reading one book a week, across a wide range of subjects – finance, psychology, history, everything. He kept a small notebook dedicated to “questions I don’t understand.” Whenever he came across something unclear, he had to get to the bottom of it. “I just like to figure out how things work,” he said.

Fifteen years later. A Dong was still in his original position. His salary had increased modestly with seniority. But as fintech disrupted traditional banking, he grew increasingly anxious about being replaced. Yet he found that he could no longer learn new things quickly – that muscle had atrophied.

And A Xi? He had long since moved far ahead. He built a reputation for insight in the industry, becoming the kind of person “everyone wants to hear from when a new problem arises.” When AI arrived, he was among the first to adopt the new tools, because his learning engine had never been turned off.

Learning rate equals return rate. That is not a metaphor. It is a fact.

**Raising a child is like risk control: stability matters more than speed.**

Now, back to your child.

What you can do for him now is not to help him get a higher diploma. It is to install in his mind an engine of learning that will never shut down.

How do you do it? I have three practical strategies – ones you can start using today.

**The first strategy: one genuine question every day.**

A “genuine question” means a question to which you yourself do not know the answer. When your child asks, “Why is the sky blue?” do not rush to give an answer. Instead say, “I am not sure either. Let’s look it up together.”

This single action is far more significant than you might imagine. It tells your child three things. First, Mum and Dad also have things they do not know. Second, not knowing is nothing to be ashamed of – finding out is what matters. Third, learning is not about passing exams; it is about understanding the world.

A child’s curiosity is the most precious fuel in his nature. Every time you respond seriously to his “why,” you are adding fuel to that engine. Every time you say, “That’s useless, stop asking,” you are siphoning a little fuel away.

**Education is not pouring things in. It is gentle guidance.**

**The second strategy: parent‑child shared reading of one book.**

This does not mean buying a book and leaving it on the shelf, nor setting a daily page quota. It means you read it yourself too, and then you talk about it with your child.

“There is an idea in this book that I find quite interesting. It says… What do you think?”

This action accomplishes three things. First, it tells the child that reading is not homework – it is something adults do in real life. Second, it gives the child a chance to express his thoughts and experience what it feels like to have his opinions taken seriously – the fastest way to build reading confidence. Third, it establishes a cultural atmosphere in the home where “learning is part of our daily life.”

Su Shi once said, “One who is well‑read naturally carries an elegant aura.” A child who grows up surrounded by books will, over time, develop a quality of character, a way of expression, and a mode of understanding the world that distances him subtly – invisibly yet truly – from his peers.

**Every child has his own unique light.**

**The third strategy: celebrate your child’s curiosity.**

This strategy looks the simplest on the surface, but in practice it is the hardest, because it requires you to change a deeply ingrained instinctive response.

When your child asks a “strange” question, when he shows strong interest in something “useless,” when he expresses an idea different from yours – what is your first reaction?

Too many parents’ first reaction is: “What use is that? Why aren’t you doing your homework?”

I understand that reaction. It comes from worry, from anxiety, from time pressure. But the signal the child receives is: my curiosity is a nuisance to my parents. After being trained by that signal enough times, the child learns not to ask, not to think, not to be curious – only to do “useful” things.

And then… that engine slowly dies.

So celebrating curiosity means: when your child asks a question that catches you off guard, first say, “Wow, that is a great question – I never thought of that.” When he becomes fascinated by something you consider useless, first ask, “What do you think is the most amazing thing about it?” When he offers a different viewpoint, first say, “Interesting – why do you think that?”

This is not indulgence. It is sending your child a core message: your desire to explore is valuable.

**Protecting nature is protecting the future.**

When I wrote my book “The Future Asset,” a judgment runs through it: in the AI era, the greatest divide between people will not be who possesses more knowledge, but who retains the stronger ability to learn. Because knowledge can be retrieved and generated by AI. But the drive to “figure things out,” that curiosity, that impulse to actively engage with something new – that is something machines do not have, and something no diploma can teach.

Confucius said, “To learn without thinking is to be lost; to think without learning is to be in danger.” [Interpretation: Learning and thinking are inseparable; you must do both.] These words, spoken more than two thousand years ago, remain the best methodology for learning today: learn, then think; think, then learn. And curiosity is the engine that keeps this cycle turning.

What you give your child now is not a set of books, not a schedule, not a learning app. It is an attitude – the attitude that “there are countless things in this world I do not yet know, and I want to find out.”

That attitude is the real growth fund for your child. The longer the time horizon, the larger the compounding effect. No inflation can erode it.

**Use a risk‑control mindset to avoid parenting pitfalls** – I have spent thirty years in risk control and seen too many people, in the second half of their lives, fall into genuine distress because they stopped learning early and were caught off guard by a new wave of change. That kind of distress is harder to bear than any economic crisis – because it is not an external shock. It is the engine inside, stalled.

Do not let your child’s engine stall. More than any diploma, preserving that spark of “I still want to know more” is the most valuable long‑term asset a parent can give a child.

**“Why is the water so clear? Because living water comes from its source.”** [Interpretation: Continuous renewal keeps things fresh.] The living water of learning begins with curiosity, with a serious question, with a parent’s words: “That is a wonderful question.”

May your child always have that living source.