How to Use Leverage to Build Real Wealth (Instead of Working Forever) | Machiavelli

Stop. Look around you right now. The car you drive, the house you sleep in, the job you wake up to tomorrow morning, none of it is yours. You are renting your entire life from people who understood one word that you don't. And every day you spend not understanding that word, you're working for them. You think you are building,

you're actually paying rent. You think you are saving, you are actually funding their acquisitions. You think you are working hard, you are actually serving as someone else's leverage. And the worst part, the part that should make you angry, is that nobody ever told you this was happening. The word is leverage. And almost everything you have been

taught about it is wrong. You have heard the word, you have probably used it. Most ambitious men think they understand it. They think leverage means borrowed money, taking on debt to acquire something. That is one fragment of the definition, a small one. The men who actually built power in this country were not operating on that

fragment. They were operating on something much larger, a complete framework for power that a Florentine politician documented 500 years ago. In a book most [music] modern finance content has never read carefully. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote more about leverage than any thinker before or since. But he did not use the English word. He used two Italian phrases that

translate roughly as forces of your own and forces of others. Forze proprie, forze altrui. Every major chapter of The Prince is built around this single question, does your power come from forces you control or from forces you borrow? Free men have forze proprie. Slaves have only forze altrui. And the brutal truth, which Machiavelli