The Prescription for Life

The wonderful life of a rural postman

A French rural postman named Chevalle one day tripped over a stone on a rough mountain road. The stone looked very strange, and it occurred to him how charming it would be to build a castle out of such a beautiful stone. So he was a postman and a stone-carrying coolie by day, and an architect by night, and he built his castle according to his own wild ideas. For more than twenty years, he kept searching for stones, transporting them, and piling them up. In his remote residence, there appeared many well-arranged castles, like a fairytale world. Even the most famous Picasso of the time paid a special visit to the buildings of Schervalle. Today, the castle is one of the most famous tourist attractions in France. It is called the Ideal Palace of the Postman Chevalle.

Many of Schervalle's nicks can still be seen in the castle stones, including one at the entrance: "I wonder how far a stone with a wish can go." It is said that this is the same stone that once tripped Schivalle.

If you really want to fly

More than a hundred years ago, a poor shepherd and his two young sons tended other people's sheep. A flock of wild geese flew through the sky, calling. The two sons said, "How nice it would be to be a flying wild goose!" The shepherd was silent for a moment, then said to his son, "You can fly if you want to." The two sons tried, but they couldn't fly. They watched with suspicion. "Let me show you," said the shepherd. So he opened his arms to imitate the goose, but he could not fly. But the shepherd said firmly, "I am too old to fly, and you are too young. As long as you keep going, you will surely fly in the future, and then you can go wherever you want." The two sons took the shepherd's words to heart, and worked on them relentlessly. By the time they grew up, after more than 1,000 test glides and a thousand wind tunnel experiments, the two did fly, because in 1903 they built the first aircraft to fly people under its own power, the Aviator 1.

The shepherd's two sons were the famous Wright brothers in America.

Dreams take persistence

More than a hundred years ago, a boy named William hoped to become a future dealer while selling newspapers and cigars on a train. "Oh, good luck. No one can predict the future."

For this dream, when William grew up, he would spend his days hiding in a small basement, drawing millions of K-lines on paper, one by one, and sticking them to the wall. Then he would meditate on the K-lines, and sometimes he would spend hours in front of a K-line diagram. Then he simply pulled together all the records of the American stock market, looking for regularity in the jumbled data. With no clients and no salary, the American had to scrape by much of the time on the help of his friends. This situation continued in his world for six years. For six years, William focused on the relationship between the movements of the U.S. stock market and ancient mathematics, geometry and astrology. Six years later, he discovered the most important predictor of stock market trends, which he named "controlling for the time factor." In this way, he made $500 million in his career as a financial investor and became a mythical figure on Wall Street who rose from rags to riches by researching theories.

His name was William Gann, the creator of the most important "wave theory" known to the world's securities industry.