For the next few years, Li travelled around, trying to find an agrarian rebel leader who would listen to his grand strategies, but his attempt to persuade Hao Xiaode () and Wang Bo () fell on deaf ears. Li was poor and often went hungry. At one point, he took the pseudonym Liu Zhiyuan and began teaching students in farming communities in Huaiyang Commandery (淮陽, roughly modern Zhoukou, Henan) how to read and write. During this period, he was so depressed that he wrote a poem about his ordeals, reading: