9 Machiavelli Principles That Force People To Respect You | Machiavellian Philosophy

You've heard the line, it's better to be feared than loved. That's Machiavelli, and almost nobody who quotes it knows the next paragraph, which says you should inspire fear in such a way that if you do not win love, you avoid hatred. For 14 years, Niccolò Machiavelli worked as a diplomat for the Republic of Florence. Between 1498 and 1512, he went on more than 40 diplomatic missions and negotiated face-to-face with King Louis XII of France, Pope Julius II, and military warlords like Cesare Borgia. His job was to figure out what these kings and popes were planning. He watched how they built alliances and broke promises and crushed their enemies. He took detailed notes on exactly how they gained power and how they lost it. In 1512, he lost his job, Machiavelli. He took everything he learned from watching those kings and popes for 14 years and wrote his famous book, The Prince. Machiavelli showed leaders how to gain respect by being sneaky and ruthless. In 1559, the Catholic Church banned The Prince along with everything else he ever wrote. He stayed on that banned list until the list itself was abolished in 1966. That's 407 years of a book being considered too dangerous to read. Now, before Machiavelli, guidebooks for kings taught them to be kind and honest and religious. Machiavelli wrote the exact opposite. He told leaders to separate politics from religion. He wrote that a successful king must be ready to lie, cheat, and use extreme violence to keep his power. Now, I don't consider myself to be a very ruthless person, and I'd personally much rather be loved than feared. And maybe that's just the Canadian in me, Or how my parents raised me. I'm a trusting person by default, and people have used that to take advantage of me at times. But I honestly don't focus too much on that. If someone screws me over, I just forget about them and move forward. So why make a video about Machiavelli then? Because I think there's always something that I can learn from anybody who's had success. If a book was banned for 470 years, then there must be powerful lessons that you and I can both apply in our own lives somehow. And even in the worst case, you and I can learn how others might use Machiavelli's thinking against us. So just being aware of those tactics can help us protect ourselves. Ultimately, respect is important for any leader to have. Respect decides who takes your call, how much you get paid, whether people do the things that they said they would do. So there are 9 principles from Machiavelli that force people to respect you that they're never taught in school. And I'm going to cover them today through the stories of the people who use them. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Principle number one: Be feared, not loved. So Machiavelli wrote that love is easily broken, but fear of punishment lasts forever. Cesare Borgia took over a region in Italy called the Romagna. The area was completely lawless and full of violent robbers, and Borgia knew that he had to bring order, but he did not want the people to hate him for being harsh. So he hired a cruel man named Remiro de Orco to act as governor. Borgia Borgia gave him full power to stop the crimes, and Remiro used extreme violence to crush the gangs and bring peace to the streets. The plan worked, but the people grew to hate Remiro for his brutal punishments, and Borgia knew this anger would eventually cause a rebellion. He needed to prove that he was in charge and calm the public at the same time. So one morning, the people woke up to find Remiro dead in the public square. Borgia had cut him in half and left the bloody knife next to the body. This shocking execution actually solved all his problems. The people were terrified of Borgia because they saw his true power. They were also satisfied that the cruel governor was dead. Borja kept control because the people feared him without hating him directly. A more modern example is when a company board uses a ruthless turnaround CEO to save a dying business. So when a company is losing money, the board of directors often fires thousands of employees and cuts budgets, but the board doesn't want the workers to hate them, so they hire a strict outside boss to do the dirty work. This new boss acts exactly like Ramiro de Orco. He fires people, cancels projects, makes harsh rules to save money, and saves the business. The employees quickly grow to hate him though. And once the cuts are finished and the company's now making money again, the board steps in. They publicly fire the hated CEO. They bring in a friendly leader to replace him. This shocks the company and solves the problem. The workers see the true power of the board, so they're afraid to break the rules, but they do not hate the board. They are just happy that the cruel CEO is gone. A famous version of this is what happened at Disney. Bob Chapek became CEO and made a lot of unpopular choices to cut costs and raise prices during the pandemic. Fans and workers hated him. The Disney board quickly fired Chapek and brought back the former popular CEO Bob Iger. Iger looked like a hero to the public. However, he kept many of Chapek's profitable changes. Principle number 2, be the fox and the lion. So Machiavelli wrote that a leader who only acts like a lion will fail. A lion is strong enough to scare away wolves, but is too blind to notice hidden traps. A fox is smart enough to spot the traps, but is too weak to fight off a pack of wolves. So you must master both skills to survive. If a ruler only uses brute force, clever enemies will trick him. If a ruler only uses tricks, strong enemies will crush him. So a successful leader switches between the 2 animals of fox and lion depending on what the threat is. Machiavelli used Pope Alexander VI as the perfect example of the fox and the lion. So the pope was the father of Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli wrote that Pope Alexander VI never did anything except deceive men. He constantly made promises that he never planned to keep. His lies always worked because he understood Human weaknesses. He played the fox to navigate the traps of politics, and he used his armies like a lion to crush those who stood in his way. A modern example could be Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple in 1997. Apple was losing money and almost bankrupt. Jobs had to use both cleverness and brute force to survive. So he played the fox by negotiating a surprise deal with Microsoft. Microsoft was Apple's biggest rival at the time. Jobs knew Apple was too weak to fight Microsoft directly, so he used his cleverness to convince Bill Gates to invest $150 million in Apple. He spotted the trap of. Bankruptcy that was coming and convinced his enemy to save his company. Once Apple had money to survive, Jobs acted like a lion. He used brutal power inside his own company. He fired thousands of employees. He killed 70% of Apple products, including printers and cameras, to focus only on computers. He knew people would be upset and that some would lose their jobs. He used his strength to crush distractions and force his team to follow his new rules. Jobs used the fox to negotiate with his rivals and the lion to command his business. Principle number 3, do the hard things all at once. If you have to punish people or make tough choices, do it quickly and all at once. Machiavelli used the example of King Agathocles of Syracuse. So Agathocles was an ordinary soldier who wanted to rule the city of Syracuse. The rich senators of the city held all the political power and stood in his way. Agathocles knew that he couldn't defeat them slowly, so he decided to eliminate all of his enemies at the exact same time. He called a special morning meeting with the entire Senate and the richest people in the city. Once everyone was inside, he gave the signal to his soldiers. The soldiers locked the doors and killed every single senator and rich citizen in the room. In just a few hours, all of his political rivals were dead. After that terrible day, Agathocles stopped killing his own citizens. He focused on defending the city from foreign armies and ruled for decades. Machiavelli used this story to teach a lesson about cruelty. He wrote that injuries must be done all at once so they are felt less. If a leader drags out punishments over months or years, the people live in constant fear and will eventually rebel. When the violence is over quickly, the surviving citizens can go back to feeling safe. A modern example is how smart companies handle mass layoffs. When a CEO needs to cut costs, they fire workers. If they fire a few people every week for a year, the entire company lives in fear. Everyone stops working because they think that they're next. The slow cuts slowly destroy the business. Instead, strong leaders do all the firing on a single day. The pain is terrible, but it's over quickly. The next morning, surviving workers know that they're safe. They can go back to work without fear. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he used this exact strategy. He wanted to completely change the business and save money. He didn't drag the process out over many months. He fired about half of the entire staff in just a few days. It was brutal. It was shocking. People were very angry. However, the cuts were done. All at once, the surviving staff knew the worst part was over, and Musk took total control of the company immediately. Principle number four: Study great leaders. So Machiavelli wrote that a smart leader never wastes time during peace. Instead, they read history to see exactly how great leaders won their battles. So if you want to be great, you have to find a successful person from the past and copy them. Machiavelli noted that the best rulers in history all use this exact strategy. Alexander the Great didn't invent his own style. He read stories about the Greek warrior Achilles. And copied his brave strategies. Later, Julius Caesar studied Alexander the Great and imitated his military moves to take over Rome. Machiavelli also pointed to the Roman general Scipio. Scipio studied the life of an ancient king named Cyrus. Because Scipio read about Cyrus, he learned exactly how to be generous and loved by his people. Scipio simply copied the behavior of Cyrus and became a hero himself. You don't need to invent new ways to win. You just need to find someone who already won and imitate their steps. A modern example is Kobe Bryant copying Michael Jordan. When Kobe Bryant joined the NBA, He didn't invent a new way to play basketball. Instead, he studied old tapes of Michael Jordan. He watched exactly how Jordan moved and copied every single detail about how he played. Kobe copied Jordan's famous fadeaway jump shot. He copied his footwork and his finishing moves at the rim. He even copied the way Jordan walked, the way that he talked, and his exact winning mentality. Kobe knew he didn't need to invent new basketball moves to be great. He just needed to perfectly imitate the greatest player in history. And the strategy worked. Kobe won 5 NBA championships. Michael Jordan Jordan himself later admitted that Kobe was the only player who could ever beat him in a one-on-one game. Jordan joked that this was because Kobe had stolen all of his moves. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Principle number 5: Build your own army. So Machiavelli wrote that a leader must only trust their own citizens with weapons. If you hire mercenaries to fight for you, you will eventually lose your kingdom. Mercenaries are soldiers who only fight for a paycheck. That's what they're there for. Machiavelli explained that a small amount of money is never enough to make a man want to die for you. During times of peace, mercenaries will steal your money. When a real war starts, they will run away to save their own lives. He warned that a skilled mercenary captain is your biggest threat. If the captain is terrible at fighting, you will lose the war. If the captain is a brilliant fighter, he will eventually turn his soldiers against you and steal your throne. He used Cesare Borgia as the perfect example. Again, so Borgia started his conquest using borrowed French soldiers and hired mercenaries. He quickly realized that they were disloyal and dangerous, so he got rid of them all and built an army out of his own subjects. His power grew instantly because his soldiers were actually loyal to him. A more modern example is Netflix building its own original shows to survive. So in the early days of streaming, Netflix did not own most of its popular movies or shows. It paid outside studios like Disney and NBC to use their content. These outside studios were exactly like mercenaries. They only helped Netflix for a paycheck. Now, Netflix knew these studios would eventually become a threat to them. When the outside studios realized how much money streaming could make, they stopped helping Netflix. They took their best shows back to start their own rival streaming companies. Disney pulled its movies to start Disney Plus. NBC took back the hit show The Office to start Peacock. If Netflix only relied on rented shows, the company would have been destroyed. But Netflix saw the trap early and built its own army. They started spending billions of dollars making their own exclusive content called Netflix Originals. They created massive hits like Stranger Things and House of Cards. Because they own these shows forever, no competitor could ever take them away. Netflix kept its power because it built its own loyal army of content instead of borrowing it from its rivals. Principle number 6: Pick a side. Machiavelli wrote that a leader who tries to avoid war by staying neutral will lose Everything. When 2 neighbors fight, you must choose a side. If you stay neutral, the winner of the war will conquer you. The winner will see you as weak and disloyal. The loser of the war will not help you because you refuse to pick up a sword when they needed you. By staying neutral, you create 2 enemies and zero friends. He used the ancient Romans to prove this point. During a war, a Greek king named Antiochus asked a local tribe to stay neutral. A Roman leader stood up and warned the tribe against his plan. The Roman told them that staying neutral was the worst possible choice. He explained that without respect and without allies, the neutral tribe would simply become a prize for the winner of the war. A smart leader picks a side and fights. If your side wins, you gain a powerful ally who owes you a favor. If your side loses, you still have a friend who will help you rebuild. A modern example is the business war between Sony and Toshiba in the 2000s. So Sony created the Blu-ray disc, Toshiba created the HD DVD. The 2 massive companies went to war to control the future of movies. Every movie studio had to pick a side. Warner Brothers tried to stay neutral. They decided to release their movies on both Blu-ray and HD DVD at the same time. They thought this was the safest choice. Instead, staying neutral was a disaster. Warner Brothers had to pay double the money to manufacture 2 different types of discs. Worse, neither Sony nor Toshiba gave them any special marketing support. And because Warner Brothers refused to be loyal, neither giant company wanted to help them. They had 2 competitors and zero friends. Warner Brothers realized their mistake in January 2008. They finally picked a side. They dropped HD DVD and announced they would exclusively support Sony and the Blu-ray format. Because they picked a side, Sony rewarded them with massive promotional support. The sudden team-up instantly destroyed HD DVD. Sony won the format war, and Warner Brothers profited as their most powerful ally. Principle number seven: Do not take their property. Machiavelli wrote that it is good for a leader to be feared, but a leader must never. Hate is the one emotion that makes citizens rise up and destroy their ruler. So how do you stop people from hating you? You keep your hands off their money, their land, and their family. Machiavelli warned that human beings are selfish. He famously wrote that a man will forgive you if you execute his father, but he will never forgive you if you steal his family home. Grief fades, but taking someone's wealth ruins their family forever. He also noted that once a leader starts stealing property, He will always find an excuse to steal more, and that endless greed creates deep hatred. A wise leader only executes a criminal when there is clear proof and a good reason. When he kills a criminal, he leaves the criminal's property alone for the family to keep. This way, the people fear the leader's strict laws, but they do not hate him. A modern example is the collapse of the energy company Enron in 2001. So when a company closes, workers lose their jobs, and losing a job is painful, but people eventually accept it and find new work. It's like Machiavelli's rule about the death of a father. Grief. Fades away over time. Enron didn't just fire its employees, though. The leaders of Enron took their life savings. The company encouraged workers to put all their retirement money into Enron stock, and when the company started failing, the bosses locked the employee retirement accounts. The workers couldn't sell their shares. To make things even worse, while the workers were locked out, the bosses secretly sold their own stock and made millions of dollars. The company crashed, and the workers lost their entire life savings. Enron didn't just take jobs; they took property. The workers didn't just. Fear the bosses; they hated them with a burning passion. This deep hatred led to massive lawsuits and criminal investigations. The top leaders were destroyed and sent to federal prison. Principle number eight: appear perfect. Machiavelli wrote that it is actually dangerous for a leader to always be good, but it is very useful to look like you are good. Most people only judge you by what they see from far away. Machiavelli noted that everyone can see what you appear to be, but very few people. get close enough to know who you really are. Because the public only sees the surface, a leader must always look merciful, honest, and highly religious. Machiavelli pointed to King Ferdinand of Aragon as the perfect example of this trick. Ferdinand wanted to conquer new lands and build a massive army. To do this, he needed money and a good excuse, so he used religion as his shield. He claimed that he was a holy king doing God's work. He used this religious excuse to tax his own citizens and steal their wealth to fund his military. He pushed the Moors and Jews out of his own country of Spain. And on the surface, the public saw a religious hero fighting for his faith. In reality, Ferdinand was just crushing his rivals and taking total control. He never practiced the mercy that he preached. A modern example is Sam Bankman-Fried and his cryptocurrency company FTX. So Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to build a massive financial empire. To get people to trust him, he used a philosophy called effective altruism. Altruism. This movement encourages people to make as much money as possible so they can give it all away to charity. Now, on the surface, he looked like a perfect leader. He drove a cheap car. He wore old t-shirts. He promised to donate billions of dollars to save the world. Politicians and the public trusted him because he appeared completely honest and caring. People judged him by this good image they saw from far away. In reality, though, he was secretly stealing customer money. He took billions of dollars from regular people who used. His website. He used their money to buy luxury houses and make risky bets to gain more power. He used the appearance of charity to hide a massive fraud. He never actually practiced the goodness that he was preaching. And principle number 9, accept the brutal reality. Machiavelli wrote that there was a massive difference between how people should live and how they actually live. He warned that the real world is full of bad people. If a leader tries to act perfectly good all the time, Those bad people will destroy him. He explained that many writers imagined perfect kingdoms that never existed. Machiavelli focused on the brutal truth of the real world. So in reality, a successful leader must learn how to do ruthless things. A ruler must look at the situation and decide if he needs to be cruel to survive. If a king refuses to be ruthless when his enemy attacks, he will lose his kingdom. Now, you don't have to go to war all the time. You just need to know how to use ruthless when the moment requires them. So modern example is Mark Zuckerberg copying Snapchat to protect his social media empire. In 2013, Snapchat was a new app that was quickly stealing young users away from Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg saw the threat and tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion. The creators of Snapchat, they said no. A leader who tries to be perfectly good would just accept the rejection. In a perfect world, a good leader would play fair and try to invent a brand new product to compete. But Zuckerberg took a more brutal approach. He knew that if he played fair, Snapchat could destroy his business. So Zuckerberg decided to be ruthless. He told his team at Instagram to just copy Snapchat's best feature. They built Instagram Stories, which looked and worked exactly like Snapchat. It wasn't fair, and many critics said it was wrong to steal Snapchat's ideas. The plan worked perfectly though. Instagram Stories became a massive hit, and Snapchat stopped growing. Zuckerberg crushed an enemy and kept his Become the person people take seriously. So it's easy to read Machiavelli and think he's teaching you to be a bad person, and there's a reason why his book was banned for 407 years, and now you know why. Personally, I think some of the rules are a little too harsh for me, but I still love learning about knowing what people are capable of so I can better protect myself and my family. And some of the rules like do the hard things all at once and study great leaders and build your own army and take a side are helpful reminders for me too. So I've I've learned a few things from making this video, and I hope you learned as well from watching it. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn how to build wealth on a low income with Machiavelli's 10 brutal strategies. If you're broke right now, it's not because you're lazy or because you're not smart enough. It's because the game was designed for you to lose and nobody ever handed you the real playbook. The Federal Reserve's own data shows the bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth in the entire country, which means half the people in the richest nation on Earth are fighting over crumbs. But 500 years ago, a ruthless Italian named Machiavelli wrote down the cold, brutal strategies that the powerful were using to win and keep winning. And today I'm handing you 10 of them, because the day you stop playing fair with a system that was never fair to you is the day everything starts to change. Let me tell you about a man named Ronald Read. He grew up up dirt poor on a farm in Vermont, so poor that he hitchhiked and walked miles just to get to school. He came home from the war and spent about 25 years pumping gas at a gas station, and then he worked as a janitor at JCPenney sweeping floors for another 17 years. He never made much money in his life. He wore the same old flannel coat held together with safety pins and drove a beat-up secondhand car. So when Ronald Read died in 2014 at 92 years old, the people in his small town got the shock of their lives. This quiet janitor had left behind an estate worth almost $8 million. He gave $4.8 million to his local hospital and $1.2 million to the library. How does a gas station attendant and a janitor die richer than most doctors? He spent less than he earned. He bought shares of boring, solid companies. And then he did the hardest thing of all— he waited for decades. He let his money quietly multiply while everyone around them spent theirs on stuff that fell apart. He wasn't lucky, he wasn't a genius. He was patient, he was disciplined, and that combination beats a giant paycheck every single time. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Ronald, but I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I can barely cover my rent, so how am I supposed to build wealth from nothing left over at the end of the month? Here's what's important to understand: building wealth on a low income was never about how much you make. It's about strategy, and strategy is the one weapon that doesn't cost you a single A high income with no strategy goes away. You've watched broke celebrities and bankrupt lottery winners prove that 100 times over. But a low income with brutal, disciplined strategy compounds into actual real freedom. The amount you start with matters far less than the rules that you're playing by. And most people never learn the rules because the people who profit from you being broke don't want you to. So let me give you the 10 moves Machiavelli would hand you if he were sitting down with you. Sitting here with you today. And fair warning, they're going to feel uncomfortable because comfort is the exact thing that's been keeping people broke. Number 1, bet on your skill, never on your luck. So Machiavelli split the whole world into 2 forces. There's fortuna, which is luck, the random chaos that you don't control. And he said it rules maybe half of your life. And then there's virtue, the— your skill, your foresight, your decisive And that's the half that you do control. Broke people spend their whole lives praying to Fortuna. They wait for the lottery ticket, the inheritance, the lucky break that's going to save them. The strategist does the opposite. You pour everything into virtue and take command of what actually is in your hands. And the very first thing in your hands is information. So start tracking every single dollar that comes in and every single dollar that goes out starting today. Most people who are broke generally have no idea where their money disappears to, and you cannot command an army that you cannot even see. So when you log every transaction for 30 days, you'll find the leaks— the subscriptions you forgot about, the little daily spends that quietly are bleeding you dry. Plugging those leaks is the easiest money that you'll ever make, and it costs you nothing but a little bit of honesty. All progress begins with telling the truth, and that includes telling the truth about your money. And foresight is the part of virtue The strategist doesn't just react to the month. He plays the long game. He sees the moves 3 years out and acts on it today while everyone else is only thinking about Friday night. You don't control whether you got dealt a bad hand, but you absolutely do control how you play it. Number 2, see the game exactly as it is. Machiavelli's most powerful rule was to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were. Were. So here is a cold reality: the financial system is not on your side. It is engineered to keep you spending and borrowing because your debt is somebody else's income. Buy now, pay later, 0% financing, credit card minimum payments— these things are all designed to look harmless while they quietly drain you for years. So you fight back with what I call rich math. Never ever judge a purchase by its monthly payment. Judge it by its full total real cost. The system trains you to ask, well, What's the monthly payment? Because that little number, it hides the damage. The wealthy ask, what does this actually cost me in total, and what could that same money become if I invested it instead? And then you hunt down your high-interest debt and you destroy it like your future depends on it. Every dollar you pay in interest is a soldier that is fighting for the other side. Take those soldiers back. Number 3, build walls of discipline. Not willpower. So a brutal truth about human beings that Machiavelli understood 500 years ago is that people are weak under pressure. Your willpower will absolutely collapse the moment when something gets hard, and life always gets hard. That's why he never trusted good intentions. He trusted strong walls. So stop relying on motivation to save money because motivation is the most unreliable thing that you can do on your own. Build the wall instead. The very moment that money hits your account, automate a transfer that pulls a set amount into a separate savings account before you can even think about it. Then make that account painful to reach. No debit card attached to it. Delete the app off your phone. The goal is to make saving completely automatic and make spending that money a genuine hassle. You pay yourself first before a single bill, before a night out. When the structure does the work, your weak moments can't sabotage you anymore. Number 4, move in complete silence. Machiavelli knew that the moment that you reveal your strength, you paint a target on your own back. The same thing is true with money. The second the people around you, they sense that you've got some, they all want a piece of it. Family starts asking for loans, friends expect you to grab every check, and worst of all, you feel this pressure to prove it with a new car or flashy wardrobe. So you do the opposite of what your ego wants. You build your wealth in total silence. You let your money be present but completely invisible. Drive the modest car for a few more years. Keep the quiet apartment. Wear the regular clothes. Let your bank account grow while your lifestyle barely changes. The broke person spends to look rich. The strategist looks ordinary on purpose and gets rich for real. Think about Ronald Read again. The whole town thought he was just a poor old janitor right up until the day he died. And that invisibility, that was a superpower because nobody Nobody ever came asking for a handout and nobody ever pressured him to keep up. Every dollar you don't spend impressing strangers is a dollar that stands guard growing your army. Let them underestimate you. The quiet ones are the ones who win. Number 5, seize assets, don't rent out your hours. The 99% trade their time for money, and that's exactly why 99% of people don't get rich. There are only 24 hours in a day. Everybody has the same 24 hours. So when you sell your hours, your income has a hard ceiling no matter how hard you're working. Machiavelli respected those who seized territory and held it. And in the money game, your territory is assets, the things you own that make money whether you show up or not. So shares of solid companies like Ronald Read bought, a small piece of real estate down the road, a digital product you build once and sell 1,000 times. This is where the pay yourself first money goes, not in into savings account to rot, but into ownership. So stop thinking like a worker who rents out your hours and start thinking like an owner who buys things that pay you. Every dollar you put into an asset is another soldier you send out to work 24 hours a day. And unlike you, that soldier never sleeps and never quits. Number 6, be ruthless about your generosity. This one might sting, but you might need it. Machiavelli warned that generosity given carelessly will bankrupt the giver and breed entitlement in everyone around them. So when you're building wealth or on a low income, you simply can't be the personal bank account for your entire circle. Giving money out of guilt drains your reserves and also trains people to depend on you instead of building things for themselves. So you give with strategy, not with guilt. Give when it actually builds something, when it lifts someone towards standing up on their own, not when you're being pressured into Protect your capital the way that the general guards the treasury that funds the entire war. Because the thing that people don't say is staying broke so that you can rescue everybody else doesn't actually help anybody. Get strong first. A wealthy you can help 100 people for the rest of your life. A broke you can't even help yourself, and it definitely can't help them. So it's the put your own oxygen mask on first before trying to save the whole plane. Number seven: Build the machine, then master one thing first. So the wise don't chase money around all day; they build a machine that commands money to come to them. Ronald Reed built a quiet machine out of dividend stocks that paid him whether he was awake or asleep. So the goal becomes to build an automated income that doesn't depend on your sweat. But listen to this carefully because a lot of people get this wrong. So don't try to build five machines at once when you're starting out. The path to wealth is on. Almost never multiple streams of income. It's not— look at people's stories, it's not. It's becoming absolutely killer at one single thing. The people who chase 5 side hustles all at the same time usually do 5 of them really badly and burn out with nothing to show for themselves. So pick one skill, one asset, one stream, and you master it until it actually pays you. Then and only then you can take that money and start building the next machine. Like the expression goes, one blade sharpened to a razor's edge beats 10 dull Number eight, pay for speed. Here's a strategy that feels completely backwards when money is tight, but it's actually how achievers win. Achievers pay for speed. So when you're broke, your instinct is to figure everything out for yourself for free. But figuring out alone can cost you years and a mountain of actually expensive mistakes. The single smartest investment a low-income person can ever make on their own is into skills and knowledge. It's into your. Because your ability to earn is the one asset that no stock market crash can wipe you out and no thief can ever steal from you. A $30 book or an online course that teaches you a skill which raises your income for the rest of your life is the highest return you can make on earth. It's not even close. Look at it this way: if you spend 3 years struggling alone to learn something an expert could have taught you in 3 months, that lost time isn't free. It's the most expensive thing that you'll ever buy, and you paid for it with time out of your life. Life. So before you try to invest in anything else, invest in your own earning power first. Sharpen the one tool that produces all the others, which is you. Number 9, speak like someone who selects, not someone who begs. Machiavelli understood that power is established by how you carry yourself. So show weakness and dependency and the world will exploit you every time. So watch how you speak about money. Broke people speak like applicants— hoping, asking, begging for a shot. Wealthy people speak like they select, like they're the prize choosing who gets access to them. You have to retrain your own thinking and language. When you sit down to negotiate a salary, a rate, a price, a deal, you communicate from a place of authority and calm value, even if you don't have a ton of money in your bank account. So stop saying, I was hoping for, and start saying, well, my rate is— stop apologizing for your Learn to say a number and then go completely silent and let it sit there, because the person who speaks first in negotiation usually loses. People will always pay more to someone who carries themselves like they're worth more. And remember, raising your income is the single fastest accelerant on this entire list, and it very often starts with nothing more than how you talk about your own worth. Number 10, strike now while everyone else is hesitant. Machiavelli said fortune favors the bold and that wealth grows in the exact spot where hesitation dies. The number one reason people stay broke for their whole life isn't a lack of money, it's waiting. Waiting for more money to start, waiting for more time to start, waiting for the perfect moment that is never ever coming. So let me be as clear as I can on this. Don't wait for permission, don't wait to feel ready because ready is fake. You start with whatever you have in your hands right now. Now invest $20 this week. Open the account today. Track your first dollar tonight. Here's how it works. You get rich slowly and then you get rich suddenly because the slow part only ever begins the moment you decide to start. The best time, they say, right, to plant the seed was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. How about right now? The story they'll tell about you. The fact that you're starting with less isn't the thing that disqualifies you. It's actually the thing that's going going to make your story pretty remarkable. Ronald Read proved that a quiet janitor can outbuild a millionaire. And if a man with a safety pin that holds his coat together can do it, so can you. You have the ability, so now you have the responsibility to actually use it. Now let's learn the Japanese art of getting rich on a low salary. How rich you become has almost nothing to do with how much you earn. The Federal Reserve found that nearly 4 in 10 American adults couldn't cover a surprise $400 expense with cash, and plenty of the people in that group earn very good money. So the Japanese skill of turning a modest income into real lasting wealth might be just the most important thing nobody ever bothered to teach you, and today I'm going to. Let me take you to Japan, to a little boy named Konosuke Matsushita. He was born in 1894 into a comfortable family, but when he was just 4 years old, his father gambled the family's money away on the rice market and They lost everything. They went from comfortable to poor almost overnight. So at 9 years old, before he even finished elementary school, little Konosuke was sent away from his family to work as an apprentice, first at a shop making charcoal braziers, then at a bicycle shop where he swept floors, he ran errands, and slept where he worked. He had maybe 4 years of formal schooling in his entire life. This was a child with nothing— no money, no education, no connections, no safety net at all. But he was willing to do anything to survive. And he did. Watching and learning and saving every small bit of money he could. As a young man, he took a job at an electric company, and in 1918, at 23 years old, with only a tiny bit of savings, he decided to start making electrical sockets out of a little apartment where he lived. His wife and brother-in-law worked alongside him. Money was so tight in those early days that at one point he had to pawn his wife's kimono just to keep the tiny business alive. And here's what actually carried him through. He was patient in a way that almost no one is. He wasn't thinking about getting rich by the weekend. He famously laid out a 250-year plan for his company because he thought in centuries while everyone else panicked about next month. He stayed frugal and disciplined his whole life, even long after the money came in. And that tiny socket workshop grew steadily and slowly into Panasonic, one of the largest companies in the world today. When Konosuke Matsushita passed away in 1989, he left behind a personal fortune of around $3 billion and a whole country that called him the God of Management. A boy with 4 years of school and a pond kimono. But notice what actually built that fortune. It wasn't a big salary, a rich family, or a lucky lottery ticket. It was the discipline he had when he had nothing, patience when everyone else wants it now, and the habit of saving and reinvesting every small bit of those things for decades. Those aren't talents that you're born with. They're habits. And habits can be learned by anyone, including you, starting with your very next payday. Now, the common objection that comes up is, okay, that's a nice story, Evan, but I don't have enough to save for anything, let alone invest. This wealth stuff belongs to people who have big salaries, not someone who's barely covering rent. I hear you. And that's why I want to go back to the Federal Reserve number. Nearly 4 in 10 adults can't cover a $400 surprise, and that group is packed with people pulling in 6 figures who spend every dollar the moment that it lands. So high income did not save them, because how much you make and how wealthy you become are 2 completely separate skills. Konosuke Matsushita started as a penniless 9-year-old apprentice. So there's a system to this, an approach the disciplined wealthy have used quietly for generations, and the Japanese have some of the most beautiful practical versions of it in the world. It works on small salary. And honestly, it works best when you start small because you build the habits before the big money ever comes in. So let me walk you through this art step by step. Pay yourself first before the world takes its cut. The first Japanese principle changes the order that keeps most people broke. Normally money comes in, you pay all your bills, you spend on whatever comes up, and then you try to save whatever little bit is left over. And there's never anything left over. Just— there just never is. And the quiet wealth They do the exact opposite. The moment money comes in, before a single bill is paid, they take a fixed slice off the top and set it aside for the future. So pay yourself first, even if just 10%, even if just 5% at the start because things are tight. The number matters far less than the habit you develop. You treat that slice as sacred. It's untouchable as your rent is, a bill you owe to the person that you're gonna be in 20 years. And here's the trick that actually makes it work. You automate it so you never even see the money and never have to rely on your willpower. Set your account to move that slice into your savings or investments automatically the day that the money comes in. What you don't see, you don't miss, and what you don't miss, you don't spend. So let's say you earn $3,000 a month, pay yourself 10%, and that's $300 moved automatically to your future before you even touch it. You learn to live on the $2,700 and you barely feel it, but that $300 a month invested and left alone turns into hundreds of thousands of dollars over a working life. A person who saves 10% of a small income ends up far wealthier than a person who saves nothing on a large So it starts with your next payday, not someday when you earn more, because someday never comes. Kakeibo. Write down every single dollar you spend. So there's a beautiful Japanese practice called kakeibo, which means something like household finance ledger, and it's over 100 years old. The idea is simple and a little uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works. So you write down by hand every single dollar you earn and every single dollar you spend, all of it. The coffee, the streaming service, the takeout, the impulse buy at checkout. Not on an app that kind of puts it behind some dashboard, but with a pen so your brain actually feels each expense. So why does this matter so much? Because money doesn't leak out in big dramatic ways. Typically it leaks out in tiny amounts that you never notice. A $4.50 premium coffee every workday adds up to $1,600 a year. A $15 ride you take twice a week instead of walking is more than $1,500 a year. One forgotten $14.99 subscription is $180 a year doing nothing. Add up a handful of these little leaks and it's often thousands of dollars a year draining out of life while you swear you have nothing left to save. John D. Rockefeller, who became the richest man of his era, kept a little book he called Ledger A as a young man with almost no money, and he wrote down every penny he earned and spent long before he was rich. Awareness comes first, always. You cannot fix a leak that you cannot see. So for one month, write down every dollar. At the end of the month, you can sit there with your ledger and ask 4 simple questions. One, how much came in 2, how much do I want to save? 3, how much did I actually spend? And 4, how can I do a little better next month? We're not trying to shame ourselves here, just some reflection. And that's where the change happens. Live below your means and stop performing wealth for strangers. So here is a truth that the wealthy understand in their bones. Looking rich and being rich are 2 completely different things, and chasing the first one destroys the second one. second one usually. So much of spending isn't even about you. It's a performance for people whose opinions will not pay your bills, and half of them aren't even paying attention to you or more. The new car, the designer logo, the upgrade you can't quite afford. It's just a costume, and the costume becomes more and more expensive. So the people who actually build real wealth choose to live below their means on purpose, and they feel genuinely free doing it because they're not a slave to anyone else's opinion. So look at Chuck Feeney. He co-founded the company behind the duty-free shops in every major airport. And became a billionaire, and he wore a $15 watch, flew coach, and lived in a modest rented apartment. He gave away almost his entire fortune around eight billion dollars because being rich was never about looking rich to him. Konosuke Matsushita stayed careful with money his whole life, long after he could have bought anything on earth. So here's the muscle that we need to start to build: when your income goes up, and it will, you don't automatically inflate your lifestyle to match it. You keep your costs steady and let the gap between. What you earn and what you spend grow wider and wider because that gap becomes the raw material of all of your wealth. So before any big purchase, ask yourself an honest question. Am I buying this for me or for how it makes me look to other people? And if the answer is other people, put it back. A smaller life that you can actually afford beats a bigger one that actually owns you. Invest the difference. Let it grow while you sleep. So here's a piece that so many disciplined savers miss, and it's the one that actually turns your savings into wealth. Saving money alone will not make you rich. If you just pile up cash in a bank account or under your mattress, inflation eats it year after year and you fall behind while you are feeling responsible. The gap that you created by paying yourself first and living below your means, that difference has to be put to work. You now have to invest it. Now, I wanna keep this calm because building wealth on a modest salary is not about gambling. It's not about chasing hot stock tips or day trading. Or throwing your rent money at whatever is trending this week. The approach is boring, and boring is exactly why it works. You buy a piece of the whole market through a simple low-cost index fund, and you keep buying it automatically every month in good times and in scary times. And then you leave it alone and you let it grow for decades. You're not trying to be a genius; you're trying to own a slice of the economy and let the time do the heavy lifting for you. This is where compounding, the most powerful force in money, goes. To work for you. Your money earns and then those earnings earn and the snowball rolls downhill for 20 and 30 years until the number becomes something that honestly looks impossible from where you're standing today. And please don't let the fear of not being a finance expert stop you because that fear keeps more people poor than bad investments do. Start with whatever you can, $50 a month just to become an investor and cross that line from someone who only spends money into someone who also owns things that grow. Once you're on the other side of that line, Everything starts to change. Kaizen, one percent better with money every month. So the Japanese have another amazing gift for you—a concept called kaizen, which means continuous improvements through small steps. It's the idea that you don't transform your entire life in one giant leap; you improve it by one percent at a time, steadily, until those tiny improvements compound into something that is enormous. So we want to apply this to your money, and it takes all the pressure off. You don't have to go from saving nothing to saving 30% overnight, which might feel impossible and makes you, you know, quit on it in a week. You just get a little better every month. So this month you automate 5% of your income. Next month you nudge it to 6%. You cancel one subscription that you forgot about. You negotiate one bill with a 5-minute phone call that saves you money for years. You learn one skill that lets you ask for a raise. None of these feel dramatic on own. And that's kind of the whole point, because each is small enough that you'll actually do it and stick with it. But stack a year of tiny 1% improvements on top of each other and you become almost unrecognizable from a money standpoint. This is also how you raise your income, which matters just as much as saving. So get 1% better at your craft every month, become more valuable, and a more valuable person earns more. Kaizen is And it's the opposite of the crash diets people try with their finances every January and then abandon by February. Small, steady, forever. That's a pace that wins, and that's a good start that you can build on. Mottainai. Treat everything you own as something not to waste. So there's one more really cool Japanese idea that I love called mottainai. It's a deep sense that waste is something to genuinely regret, that everything has value and shouldn't be just carelessly thrown away. So in a world that is constantly telling you to go buy the new thing and toss out the old one, motainai is more radical, and it's a wealth-building superpower. It means you maintain and repair the things you own instead of instantly replacing them. It means you use something fully before buying its replacement. It means when you're about to spend, you pause for a second and ask yourself, do I truly need this, or am I just bored, or am I just trying to impress somebody else? This mindset naturally protects you from one of the biggest wealth killers Lifestyle creep—the sneaky way your spending rises to swallow every raise that you ever make. So you make more and more, and somehow you never get ahead. When you respect what you have, you stop needing an endless drive of new things just to feel okay, and that contentment is worth more than almost anything that you can actually buy. This stretches beyond your wallet, which is why I love it. What I teach you not to waste your time, your talent, or your one-shot life chasing things that you don't actually care about or matter. Matter to you. A person who respects a $20 bill enough not to waste it usually respects an hour enough not to waste it too. And those 2 habits together carry you further than any one-time lucky break. So waste nothing, value what you have, and watch how much more of your money stays yours. Think in decades. The long game is the whole game. So everything I've shared rests on one final principle that ties The whole Japanese art of quiet wealth together, and it's patience. You have to think in decades. Konosuke Matsushita literally planned 250 years into the future because he understood that anything truly great is built slowly, brick by patient brick. In money, this is the difference between the people who make it and the people who don't. The person who invests a small amount every month and refuses to touch it for 30 years ends up wealthy. The person who panics and sells the moment that the market dips. Or raids the account to buy something shiny, resets the clock to zero over and over and never gets anywhere. Compounding needs one thing above all else to work its magic: time you refuse to interrupt. So build yourself a buffer first, an emergency fund of a few months of expenses, so a surprise bill or a lost job never forces you to sell your future just to survive the right now. The old farmers stored grain against a bad harvest just for a reason. Then with that buffer in place, you can plant the seeds as you wait calmly through every scary headline in the news. There's an image that I love. It's a bird sitting on a branch, isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch. It was in her wings. So your wings here are your habits. These habits, this system, the discipline that you're building. Once you trust a system, you stop panicking about every up and down that happens. I think your purpose comes from your pain, and if money has been a source of pain. Pain and fear in your life, then mastering this art can become part of your mission. The thing that you model and then you teach your kids and the people around you. Play the long game because it's the whole game. So there's the quiet Japanese art of becoming wealthy, and none of it required a big salary. So pay yourself first, track every dollar, live below your means, invest the difference, get 1% better every month, waste nothing, and think in decades. A boy with 4 years of school and a pond kimono built an empire on those bones. And you're standing here with far more than he ever had. So you know when the best time to begin is? Right now. How about right now? If you can do this, and you absolutely can, then you must. To learn the 7 silent killers of success, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The habits that kill your success are silent, and that's exactly why they win. When I was at the peak of my career, I felt like I'm unbeatable, and I feel like I could do anything. I'm kind of walking on the water. We all experience that in our own lives.