CASH FLOW MASTERY: How to Think in Systems, Not Salaries

You will never build real freedom from a salary alone. You're not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity, a piece of a business, to gain your financial freedom. Profits are better than wages. Wages make you a living, which is fine. Profits make you a fortune, which is super fun. Gallup found that only 31% of American workers are actually engaged at their jobs, the lowest level in over a decade. This is about more than money. It's about whether you spend your one life building a machine that pays you or renting out your best 2 hours to build a machine for someone else. Let me tell you about a man who figured this out as a teenager with almost no money in his pocket. His name was Fred DeLuca. Back in 1965, Fred was just 17 years old and stressed about how he was going to pay for college. He wanted to become a doctor, but the money wasn't there. He didn't have it. So at a backyard barbecue, a family friend named Pete handed him an idea and a $1,000 loan: open a sandwich shop. That summer, Fred opened one tiny sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was not glamorous, and that first shop barely made any money. But Fred didn't want to just run a sandwich shop for the rest of his life. He wanted to understand the system behind it so he could repeat it. He got obsessed with the process— how to make the sandwich fast, how to run the store lean, how to teach a total stranger to do it exactly the same way he did. And once he had a system that actually worked, he did something incredible. He didn't open store number 2 by himself. He taught other people to run his system and let them open the stores so the whole thing could grow without Fred standing behind every single counter. That one idea, turning a shop into a repeatable system other people could run, grew Subway into more than 40,000 locations around the world. Fred DeLuca started with a $1,000 loan and one little store. And built a machine that paid him whether or not he ever made another sandwich himself. He didn't get rich from a salary or from working more hours than everyone else. He got rich by building a system that other people could run and then owning it. Now, you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Fred DeLuca, but you can't exactly go build a 40,000-store empire from your kitchen table. You've got a schedule, a boss, a job. So how does any of this help you on a random Tuesday morning? The system isn't about a fast food chain. A system is just any repeatable way of producing income that doesn't depend on you showing up every hour to trade your time for money. It can be small. It can start on the side at night with almost no money. The point isn't to build a 40,000 store empire tomorrow. The point is to stop thinking like someone who only earns when they clock in and start thinking like someone who's building something on the side that earns on its own. So you don't need permission to do this. You don't need to feel ready. Let me show you exactly how to start thinking in systems instead of salaries. 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. Be a killer at one thing before you chase 10. So I need to warn you about something because the internet is full of bad advice on this. You've probably heard that rich people have 7 streams of income, so you go and try to create all 7 things at once. A little store here, some crypto there, a bit of dropshipping, a side gig, and you spread yourself so thin that every single one of them stays small. That's the fastest way to burn out and end up with nothing. Nothing. Here's what actually works. The path to real wealth, especially in the beginning, is not using multiple streams. It's being an absolute killer at one thing. Pick one skill, one business, one problem that you can solve better than almost anyone else and pour everything into it until it's genuinely great. Depth beats scatter every single time. When you try a bunch of things that you don't understand and you do them all badly, the market can smell it and you won't make any money. Fred DeLuca didn't run 7 different kinds of businesses. He ran one sandwich shop and he became obsessed with getting that single system perfect. The exact way to build a sandwich, how fast the line moved, how to train a brand new person to do it the same way every time. He drilled that one thing until it was flawless, and only then did he multiply it. That's the order that works. Master one thing, then systemize it, then scale it. The multiple streams comes later, and when they come, they'll mostly flow out of that one thing that you mastered first. So stop trying to do 10, mediocre things at once. Build one boat that actually floats and make it the best boat on the water. Here's a simple test to find your one thing. What can you do that people already come to you for? What do your friends ask you for help with? What could you happily work on at 11 at night and not notice the time? That intersection, the thing that you're good at and drawn to and that other people will pay you for, is where you start to— you plant your flag. Then commit to it for real, not just for one weekend. Give it a year of full focus before you ever think about starting the second thing. Almost everyone quits their one thing right before it was about to work, and they jump to a new shiny idea and start the clock over again from zero. Don't restart the clock. Stack your years on one thing and let it compound. Turn yourself into a system, then step out of it. So right now, if you own a small business or you're self-employed, there's a good chance that you don't really own a business. You own a job that you can never quit because the whole thing lives inside, you know, right here, lives inside your head and stops the second that you stop. That's not freedom. That you've just built yourself a You have your own form of prison. The fix is to turn what you do into a system that exists outside of you. So you start by writing down every single thing that you do to make money step by step, like you're writing instructions for a complete stranger. How do you find a customer? How do you talk to them? How do you actually deliver the work? How do you get paid? It's boring, but it's powerful because the moment that it's written down, it stops being just you and it starts becoming a process. And a process can be taught, can be improved, can be handed off to somebody else, can be repeated. Without you. This is exactly what Fred DeLuca did with Subway. He didn't just hope that each new shop would turn out okay, right? He built a simple, repeatable system for making the sandwich and running the store so that someone brand new could open a location and get the same result that he got in his first one. He removed himself from the outcome by building a system that carried the standard for him through every store. You can do the same thing just at your scale. Right? Once the process is on paper, you could train someone to run a part of it, then another part. Every piece that you successfully hand off buys you back a little bit more of your time and your life. The goal that you're aiming at is simple, and it's, I think, pretty huge. Build the thing so well that it can run without you, because a business that can run without you is an asset, and a business that can't is just an extra stressful job that has your name on it, right? So start with the task that you do most often, the one that eats your biggest chunk of your week. Write down exactly how you do it, every step, and then the next Next time it comes up, follow your own instructions and fix anything that's unclear. Do that a few times and you'll have an actual playbook, not just some idea that lives in your head. Then find the one task you hate most or waste the best hours and make that the first thing you train someone else to handle using your playbook. You don't have to hire a full-time employee to start. It can be a few hours a week from one person. What matters is that you prove to yourself the work can happen without your hands on everything. Once you feel that for the first time, you get hooked because you just watched your income keep moving while you stepped a little bit away, and that feeling is the whole point of building a system. Stop being an employee of your own money. This one is more of a mindset shift, and it just starts to change how you see the, the whole game. You stop thinking like a person who gets a paycheck, and you start thinking like a corporation, like an owner. A worker earns money, pays taxes on all of it, and spends whatever is left over. A smart business does it in the exact opposite order. It earns, it keeps the money working inside the system, and it reinvests to grow and is built to be efficient with what it owes. The difference repeated for years becomes the difference between just running on a treadmill constantly and actually, you know, climbing the staircase towards success. You don't need to be huge to start thinking this way. When your one thing starts making real money, get proper advice about setting it up the right way so more of what you earn stays inside your system doing work instead of leaking out to somebody else. A business that's structured well can pay for the tools that it uses, the space that it needs, the help that it hires, all before the tax ever gets counted. While an employee pays for every one of those things with money that's already been taxed. That's not some loophole. That's the entire way that the system's been designed to help people who build and own instead of the ones who just earn and spend. So keep money working in the business to buy tools and assets and help that make you more money. Pay yourself in a smart, planned way instead of grabbing every dollar that comes a second it lands, because every dollar that you leave working in the business, in the machine, is helping build the machine and the business bigger. The rich don't treat their income like it's just this paycheck that they can go off and spend. They treat it like it's food for the machine, and they keep feeding that machine until it's strong enough to feed them for the rest of their lives. 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 your 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 will see you there. Own the thing that does the earning. So a salary pays you for showing up and doing the work. An asset pays you for existing. The whole leap from thinking in salaries to thinking in systems comes down to this one idea: stop only selling your time and start owning things that produce income on their own. So if we go back and think about what Fred DeLuca really owned, it wasn't one sandwich shop that needed him to be behind the counter. He owned the system and the brand behind tens of thousands of shops, and that system paid him a piece of every store in every city, whether he showed up or not. The person running one shop Bob earned from the hours that they put in. Fred earned from the entire network all day long, everywhere at the same time. He owned the thing that did the earning, not a job inside of the thing. You wanna build your life the same way at whatever size that you're at right now. Own a piece of the business, not just a spot on his payroll. When you help a company grow, ask for a slice of it instead of a flat fee so you keep getting paid long after the work is actually done. Package your skills into a product that sells while you sleep instead of only trading your time for money. Put your surplus into assets that send you money back month after month, long after you did the work to buy them. Every dollar you move from your hands into the machine, into an engine, is a dollar that never has to be earned by hand again. Every one of those moves does the same thing for you. It separates your income from the hours. The employee is stuck in this simple, brutal equation: no hours, no money. Get sick, no money. Take a vacation, no money. The owner breaks that equation on purpose so that the earning keeps happening even when they're at their kid's game or vacation or sleeping. That's what it really means means to think in systems instead of salaries. You build or buy the engine, and the engine keeps working for you. And you don't have to own something enormous for this to completely change your life. Owning even one small income-producing thing starts to change how you see the whole world. The first time money shows up in your account from something that you built rather than an hour of you trading your time, something changes. You stop asking, how many hours can I sell? And start asking, how many engines can I build? And that question, asked over and over for years, becomes the whole difference between a person who retires wears exhausted and a person who is genuinely free. So start with one small engine, then continue to build. Use leverage so the machine outlives your energy. This advice allows the system to grow far past what you could ever do on your own. Leverage. Leverage just means you're using something other than your own raw effort and money to get the work done. So there are three kinds that you can start using right now, no matter how small you are. The first is other people. So you will never scale by being the only worker in your business. The moment you can, you hand off tasks that don't need you so your time goes to the things that actually move the needle forward. The second system is tools. A good piece of software, AI, simple automated process can do the work of several people all day without lunch break or days off. And the third is other people's attention and audiences. So partnering with someone who already has the customers you want can grow you faster than years of just grinding by yourself. It's actually what saved my first company when I was dead broke and about the I was making $300 a month and staring at giving up. And what saved me was I stopped trying to do everything myself and started building partnerships instead, borrowing other people's reach instead of trying to build everything by myself from scratch. One of those partnerships led straight to my first deal, a great deal for me at the time, and that one deal kept the whole dream alive. I didn't outwork my problem. I just created leverage towards solving it. Leverage is how a system keeps producing even when your personal energy might run out, because your energy always runs out eventually. So you're one person with 24 hours. A machine built on leverage doesn't get tired. It doesn't sleep, doesn't cap out at a number of hours in your day. And if you have the ability to build something that serves people while you rest, then I think you have the responsibility to go and build it. If you can, then you must. So don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready. And you know when the best time to start is? Right now. How about right now? You were built to own, not just to clock in. You were never meant to spend your whole life renting out your hours. So start with one thing. Make it great. Turn it into a system. Own the engine and use leverage to let it grow beyond you. Being leads to doing. So decide today that you are a builder of systems and let the action follow. Your purpose comes from your pain, and every frustrating hour that you have traded for a paycheck can become a fire inside you that builds something that finally pays you back. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn why you don't need a job to make money. Security in a corporate job doesn't exist anymore. The safe job is about to be unsafe. So far this year, companies have cut more than 800,000 jobs. That's the highest number we have seen since the pandemic. Major West Michigan company plans to cut hundreds of jobs tonight. Grand Rapids-based AccraSure is telling us that artificial intelligence is replacing actual employees. Over 80% of students feel they learn nothing about entrepreneurship in school, even though most want to start their own businesses. The only non-gamble in life is going on offense, and you've been taught that going on offense is the gamble because the school system was literally created to create factory workers. Our school systems teach us nothing about money, nothing. It's pathetic. So at 25, I recommitted to my education, but this time I started studying not things that were in books, but people that had actually created wealth. Sticking to a traditional career path limits your impact, keeps you miserable, and stops you from sharing your unique genius with the world. My sense is that even for the, the kids that get into the, um, the elite colleges at this point, it's like you've passed some Mandarin examination in China, but you're just exhausted you're never going to do anything more for the rest of your life. You're burned out at 18. You take a calculated risk to start a company realizing you may forgo a couple of years of steady income in another job, um, and whatever else. That's a great risk to take, and if you don't take that risk, I think you have a very high chance that you end up regretting that. Where are you going to spend your time, your energy, is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. When I was 19, I had the hardest choice to to make. I was in university and I had a job offer for a safe six-figure investment banking job. It was a job everybody wanted. But I also had a chance to own 30% of a biotech software making only $300 a month, and I picked the startup. I chose to struggle, eat beans for lunch, because the thought of sitting in a cubicle doing work I hated scared me more than being broke. I knew I had to take control of my own income. Think about Colonel Sanders. At 65 years old, he had a tiny $100 $105 Social Security check. He didn't go looking for a greeter job at a local store. He took his chicken recipe, hit the road, and slept in his car. He faced 1,009 rejections before finally someone said yes to his franchise idea. He proved that you can create massive wealth at any age just by owning your own ideas instead of working for someone else. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't pay their rent in San Francisco. They didn't rush out to get safe, normal jobs. Instead, they put 3 air mattresses on their floor and charged people to sleep there during a local design conference. That simple idea turned into Airbnb. They created a $100 million company because they look for a creative way to solve a problem instead of looking for a safe corporate salary. And right now you might be thinking that you need thousands of dollars in the bank to start making your own money. You think you need rich parents or some giant loan you need money to own, succeed. And that's not true. Colonel Sanders was broke at 65. Airbnb started with 3 cheap air mattresses. You don't need money to make money. You just need a problem to solve and the courage to take the first step. I'm going to show you exactly how to start generating your own income from scratch right now. Solve your own biggest problem. To make money without a job, you've got to realize where value actually comes from.. You get paid for bringing value to other people. The absolute easiest way to bring value is to look directly at your own life. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggle with the most is exactly what you want to help other people overcome. So think about your past. If you had a hard time getting fit and you figured out a system that works, that system is your new business. If you struggle with anxiety and found a way to manage it, that method, that's your business. You don't need a fancy business degree. To make this happen, you just need to be one step ahead of the person that you're trying to help. Over 62% of billionaires are totally self-made, meaning they've created their wealth by solving real problems, not by inheriting cash. People pay you to solve their problems because they desperately want to skip the pain that you have already went through. You're selling speed and convenience. If you can help someone skip 5 years of painful trial and error, they pay you for that shortcut. So don't think you need to invent the next big tech platform to be successful. Look at the local business in your town. They need help with their marketing, their accounting, their daily operations. They've got massive problems right now. You can step in and help fix those problems. When you focus entirely on serving others and solving their actual pain points, you stop acting like an employee begging for a simple paycheck and you start acting like a true entrepreneur commanding a premium price. You stop handing out weak resumes and start handing out powerful solutions for problems. The simple shift in your mindset It changes everything. You go from hoping that a boss picks you to knowing that the market desperately needs you. So you've got to stop looking for a company to hire you and start looking for a person to help. The money will always follow the value you provide. So if you fix a $100 problem, you make a little bit of money. If you fix a $1,000 problem, you make a lot more money. It's simple. Your job right now is to identify the most expensive problem you know how to solve and then go find the exact people who are crying out for that exact solution. But finding a problem is only the first step, because your surroundings might be secretly destroying your chances of success. Change your environment to change your mind. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are right now. So if your friends all have traditional jobs, they'll constantly tell you to get a safe job. They aren't trying to hurt you, they just don't understand your big vision. Research shows that you're up to 61% more likely to adopt the exact habits and mindsets of the people close closest to you. So if you want to make your own money, you must change your daily environment. You've got to completely shut out the negativity, limit your access to people who doubt you, and fill that empty space with extreme positivity and the specific messages you actually want to hear. So if you can't find supportive friends in your own town yet, go find them online. Read powerful books, listen to great podcasts, watch amazing YouTube videos from the exact people who are already doing what you want to do. I started my YouTube channel because I wanted to surround myself with some of the greatest minds in history. I wanted Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett in my ear every single morning. I wanted their intense ambition to rub off on me. You've got to be incredibly intentional with your daily morning routine. Don't wake up and immediately scroll through toxic social media or the depressing news. Start your day with content that makes you believe in yourself. When you consume assume greatness daily, it starts to feel completely normal. Soon the idea of settling for a boring cubicle will feel totally insane to you. You'll begin to think bigger, act faster, expect so much more of yourself. You can literally rewire your entire brain for massive success just by changing what you look at and who you listen to every single day. So treat it like a garden, right? Your mind is a garden. If you plant negative seeds, you'll grow a massive negative life. If you plant seeds of belief, you'll grow a massive, awesome empire. You've got to ruthlessly protect your focus. So stop giving your attention to things that make you feel small and start obsessing over the ideas that make you feel powerful. The moment you change your inputs, the outputs will transform forever. But once you fix your surroundings, you need a system to actually get you moving, which brings us to the Simple 2% Trick. Use the 2% rule to build massive momentum. Momentum. The biggest thing you're missing right now is just momentum. You're sitting on a truly great idea, but you haven't taken any real action. You're constantly overthinking it. You want everything to be 100% perfect before you finally launch. You want the perfect logo, the perfect website, the perfect business plan. Stop doing that. Perfectionism is just you being afraid. Studies reveal that perfectionism actually decreases your productivity and increases severe mental burnout. You don't need a perfect plan. You just need to execute the first 2%. If your goal is to write a book, best-selling book, the first 2% is writing just one single page. If your goal is to start a massive YouTube channel, awesome, the first 2% is pulling out your phone and recording your first really messy video. Don't worry about step 100, just focus completely on step number 1. Take the absolute smallest, easiest action right now. Once you take that first step, your brain, it gets a— it's a quick win, and that quick win builds confidence, and that confidence creates momentum. So when I wrote my book about momentum, I didn't plan it out for long months. I just started typing furiously. The physical action itself creates the energy you need to keep going. So waiting around for the perfect moment, what does it do? It guarantees that you'll wait forever. Action cures fear every single time. When you're moving forward, you simply don't have the time to sit there and doubt So don't let your greatest ideas die just silently here in your head. Put them out into the real world. Start messy, start small, but you've absolutely got to start. When? Today. It doesn't matter if your first attempt looks crazy, ridiculous. The only thing that matters is that you aren't just standing still anymore. You're finally in the game. Every massive company started as some tiny, flawed little experiment. You are no different. So push through the hesitation, click publish, Make the call and watch how quickly your life begins to change. Now that you're moving though, you've got to prepare yourself for the hardest phase of all, and this is where almost everyone quits. Expect to be terrible at first. So now you've got to accept a really harsh reality. Your first attempt at anything new is going to be absolutely terrible. Your first product will have tons of flaws. Your first, uh, video will be incredibly embarrassing. Your first major sales call will feel look completely awkward, and that is completely normal. Everyone starts out at the bottom. You just don't see the messy hidden starts. Data shows that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to truly master any complex skill. You just can't skip the struggle. When I first started on YouTube, I was completely terrified. I was shy, quiet, introverted. I did not like being on camera. It took me 350 videos before I completely embarrassed to watch myself back and 700 public videos before I actually felt inspired by one piece of content that I made. And I made absolutely hundreds of terrible videos. You can go back and watch them, but I kept going anyway. Most people just quit because they tried 5 times and they expected to be world-class immediately. They let the ego stop you from making actual progress. So the fact that you're willing to try and be terrible becomes an actual secret advantage. So embrace the highly awkward phase. Look at your early failures as data, and that's gonna be part of your story as you climb. Every single time you fail, you learn exactly what not to do the next time. It will be an inspiration to others. If you can handle looking foolish for a little while, you'll eventually become completely unstoppable. The only real failure in life's quitting before you get good. So you've got to give yourself permission to be a total beginner. Stop comparing your chapter 1 to somebody else's chapter 20, right? Right? Your journey is your journey, and that is okay. So put in the boring reps, do the unglamorous work. The mastery that you want is waiting on the other side of 1,000 terrible attempts. And once you survive that awkward phase, you can speed up your results by borrowing the exact blueprints of people who've already won. Model the massive success of others. You don't need to figure out all of this on your own. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I made earlier on. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to make a massive fortune. The smartest entrepreneurs study the exact people who've already won and simply model their success. So if you want to build a $100,000 consulting business, find someone who already did exactly that. Study their public website, look at their specific pricing, see exactly how they talk to their premium clients, then thoughtfully apply those same proven principles to your own unique style.. According to the Small Business Administration, businesses that receive direct mentoring and strictly model-proven strategies are 2 times more likely to survive their first 5 difficult years. When my first business was struggling, I felt completely lost. I had no real idea how to turn things around. Then I decided to intensely study a highly successful software company, Microsoft, because I had a software company. I looked at how they operated, looked at how they got their first clients, not how they make an extra million now I didn't steal or copy them, but I learned directly from Bill Gates's powerful framework. That single focus decision saved my entire company. Success always leaves clues. There is a roadmap out there for you to do whatever you want and achieve whatever you want. You just have to be humble and curious enough to actively go and follow it. So read the biographies of great leaders, watch the long-form interviews of the performers that you look up to and respect, find the hidden patterns in their daily behaviors, and then creatively adapt them to your situation. Why would you spend 10 years making deeply painful mistakes when you can learn from someone else's expensive experience in just 10 days or 10 hours? So be an aggressive student of greatness and your path to financial independence will be so much faster. You don't lack the ability, you just lack the right model. So find your ideal model, study them relentlessly, build your own blueprint for your special flavor. And then when you've got the right model, you need the right people. And there's a specific way to get the most powerful CEOs to take your call. Build real relationships instead of fake followers. So most people think that making money online means you definitely need millions of random followers, right? You think that you need to go incredibly viral to succeed, and that's a massive and actually dangerous distraction. You don't need a million casual subscribers to make a million dollars. You just need deep, highly meaningful relationships. Don't worry about the vanity metrics. They will constantly waste your time. Instead, focus on Direct business development through high-value connections. One of my favorite strategies, what we teach inside our Movement Makers program, is a business development show. It's a dedicated interview show. Don't constantly cold call potential clients. Warmly invite them onto your show to share their story. People love talking about themselves. When you feature them prominently, they feel valued and you built a relationship. Statistics clearly show that 84% of B2B sales start exactly with a warm referral or strong existing relationship. When you interview someone, you spend real focused time with them. You build authentic trust with them. That genuine trust turns into lucrative partnerships, massive referrals, highly paying clients. It literally doesn't matter if your new channel only has 200 total subscribers. We're going after people who have high demand but low media demand. You're coming in as media right now and you can get top industry leaders who built multimillion-dollar networks. So don't worry about the random clicks and start aggressively chasing real conversations. Add massive value to the exact people that you desperately want to work with. Feature their deep expertise. Ask them incredibly great questions. Do your research before you have them on. Give them a beautiful platform to share their story. When you actively become a super connector and a supporter, the big money naturally follows you everywhere you go. Your network is truly your actual net worth, so start building it deliberately and strategically today. Stop worrying about the algorithm and start obsessing over the actual human beings you want to serve. And building that network takes extreme focus, which means you've got to completely change how you manage your 24 hours. Make every single day truly count. Your limited time is your absolute most precious asset. If you want to permanently escape the endless job cycle and build your own incredible life, you've got to maximize your specific specific daily action. So you wake up every morning with a clear intention: make today truly count. Before you hit your head, uh, your tired head on the pillow tonight, do one specific thing that moves you significantly closer to your dream. Make one beautiful piece of art, send one highly important email, record one incredibly helpful video. Create something today that you desperately want your future grandkids to see. Research strongly indicates that completing Doing just one highly meaningful task a day significantly boosts your overall life satisfaction and guarantees long-term success. To make real time for that meaningful work, you've got to ruthlessly manage your busy schedule. You must eliminate, automate, or delegate absolutely everything else. If a specific task doesn't directly serve your core mission, stop doing it. If a basic computer program or AI can do it, awesome. Automate it immediately. Absolutely. If someone else can do something significantly cheaper, hire them right away. Don't waste your unique genius on boring busywork. Focus only on the high-level tasks that actually move the big needle forward. When you finally take control of your daily time, you instantly take total control of your personal income. You stop hopelessly trading hours for a flat, boring salary and start aggressively trading massive value for huge financial returns. You already have absolutely everything it takes to build a beautiful life of total freedom. You just have to firmly decide that you're ready to step up and claim it. And this brings us to the absolute most important truth of all, and it's something that I hope that you remember every single morning when you wake up. Your belief is your ultimate superpower. You are entirely capable of building a massive life on your own terms. So trust your vision, take the messy action, and never let fear make your decisions for you. Now let's learn how to build wealth on a low come using Machiavelli 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 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 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 Reed 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. 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 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 dollar. 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 discipline 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 here with you today. And fair warning, they're gonna 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 two 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 virtù, the— your skill, your foresight, your decisive action. 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. 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 too. 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. 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 500 500 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 assume 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 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 a thousand times. This is where the pay yourself first money goes— not 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 doing it. Protect 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 7: 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 Read 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 5 machines at once when you're starting out. The path to wealth is 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 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 you'll reach 10 dull blades every single time. Number 8: 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 into skills and knowledge, is into yourself, 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. 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 prices, 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 hesitating. 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 begins right 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 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. If you want to learn the financial system explained in 60 minutes like you're a 5-year-old, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The money sitting in your bank account is quietly losing value every single day, and the whole system is set up so you barely even notice. The best investment against inflation is to improve your own earning power.