[0:00]This is how most people play the game of money, sacrificing pawns, obsessing on the small moves. But real wealth, it's not about the pawns, it's about moving pieces that actually change the game. Because while most people spend their lives reacting, the wealthy are playing to win. And the worst part, nobody ever taught you the real rules. You'll stay in the job that you pick for the rest of your life. We are one of the wealthiest nations in history, and yet seemingly, no one has any money. Which raises a haunting question, how can you make money and not lose? In 2016, a lottery winner named David Lee Edwards, who walked away with $27 million in winnings, was found living in a storage unit, penniless, battling addiction. He had gone from instant multi-millionaire to broke in less than a decade. And he is not alone. Six figure earners are living paycheck to paycheck. Celebrities filed bankruptcy after careers worth hundreds of millions. People are financing their Door Dash orders. This is not just a story of bad luck, or greed, or poor judgment. It's about a system, a game. A game of money that has rules most people were never told. Rules that quietly separate those who play to survive, from those who play to win. And unless you learn the rules, you'll spend the rest of your life running harder and harder in a race you are never designed to finish. You see, schools and the systems are basically prisons. They keep kids locked up physically and mentally, and prepare them for jobs that are basically prisons, until they retire and go to a nursing home, their final prison. So in this video, let's pull away the blindfold. I'm definitely not in the rat race now, but I used to be. I worked in corporate jobs in cubicles with padded walls at Goldman and State Street. I had a job where I had to clock in and clock out every time I went to the bathroom at Vanguard, the bathroom. I refuse to go back there. It actually scares the hell out of me. But we're going to expose why you were never taught the real game of money, and how the system is structured, and what you can do today to stop playing as a pawn on the board and start becoming the one making the rules. Part one, the illusion of the rat race. Most people's financial lives look like this. Go to school, get a job, earn wages, spend them on expenses, repeat. The cycle is so deeply ingrained that we don't even question it, but it's a treadmill, a rat race. Every raise is matched by a new expense, every windfall canceled by a new debt. The faster you run, the more exhausted you get, and you never actually move forward. A survey found that 78% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck. But what is even more shocking? Even among people earning over $100,000 a year, one in 10 are still broke at the end of every month. The answer lies in what I call the consumption trap. This is what stops you from becoming rich. This is you. You earn money, you start motoring, but every time you get it, you spend it. So you're forever stuck in a cycle that never has an end. Ask 10 people to define money, and you'll hear some version of this. It's a medium of exchange. But that's not very useful. A better way to think of it is, money is stored value. You exchange money for something because you believe its value is equal to the dollars you gave up. But here's the problem. From an early age, we are conditioned to see money not as stored value, but as fuel for consumption. Good grades, good job, paycheck, expenses. Entire economies are built on this cycle. Advertisers fuel it, credit cards lubricate it, social media amplifies it. And it creates a culture where our worth is measured by what we consume. The car we drive, the shoes we wear, the vacations we post online. Dad, what do we have to go to school? So you can get a job. But why do I need a job? So you can earn money. But why do I need money? To buy the stuff that TV makes us want. But why do I need to buy stuff? Because if you didn't buy stuff, everyone would be out of a job and no one would have any money. Wait, so I have to work for the rest of my life to pay for stuff that I don't want, just so everyone else can suffer the same horrible fate as me? Consumption never creates wealth. At best, managing your consumption keeps you from falling apart. At worst, it chains you to debt, anxiety, and financial fragility. That's why high earners aren't even safe. 62% of people making over $300,000 a year still struggle with credit card debt. And why millennials now fear debt more than death itself. 66% of us say we're more scared of running out of money than dying. Because in the consumption trap, your entire financial life is defined by what goes out. And unless you break out of that paradigm, you'll never have anything left over to build with.
[4:32]Part three, defense wins games, but not championships. Let me be clear, mastering consumption necessary. But remember, the master was once a beginner, too. So you start like a snowball down the hill. You face your numbers, you journal expenses, you build a budget, you live below your means. Out of its total weekly income, Jack's family allows so much for food, household, clothing, recreation, each part of their regular expenses is allowed for in the budget. Create an emergency fund, three to six months of expenses. That's the minimum, and it's simple, maybe not easy. A proven savings framework for every paycheck, 50, 30, 20. The rule is, you give 50% of take-home pay to essentials, only things you need. 30% to discretionary spending once, and 20% directly to savings. So you're spending most of what you earn on your housing, food, utilities. You're spending 30% on entertainment, dining out, hobbies. 20%, you pay yourself first. You know why? Because what should really scare you, and what scares me, is having to go work a normal job. A job I hate where you take the subway every single day, and a commute that feels like you're wasting time, to a place where you like nobody that you work alongside, doing things that don't stimulate you or inspire you. For a bunch of people where the mission is not yours. I think that should scare you too. So this is financial defense, it keeps you in the game, but here's the paradox. Defense doesn't win championships, so yes, cutting Starbucks might save you $5 a day, but nobody builds generational wealth by skipping lattes. You can cut until you're blue in the face, and the best you'll achieve is being comfortably not broke. You know what keeps me up at night? That I wasn't made for this. Which brings us to the other side of the equation. Part four, the power of production. When it comes to wealth, offense wins. If you think the life I'm chasing is crazy, one of freedom and possibility, I think the life most people accept is crazy, one of monotony and boredom. Warren Buffett didn't become one of the richest men alive by skipping lattes. Elon Musk didn't become a billionaire by skipping brunch. They both mastered their burn, yeah, but the real wealth came from production. Production means creating value and capturing part of it. It looks like identifying a problem, creating a solution, delivering that solution at scale. It's often called the cash flow quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki, which categorizes four primary ways people earn income. Employee, self-employed, business owner, investor. The first two, you work for other people. The second two, the money works for you. That's it. It sounds simple, but it's the one thing school never taught you. Because schools weren't designed to teach you to build wealth, they were designed to produce workers. Dependable, disciplined, compliant workers. That's why only 6% of Americans run a business profitably. That's why we were taught how to write resumes, but not balance sheets. Why we learned quadratic equations, but not compounding interest. Because if everyone knew how to play the money game, who would clock in? Part five, the hidden rules of the game. So what are the real rules? The ones the wealthy quietly exploit. They can be boiled down to five concepts. Compounding, the most powerful force in finance. Your money earns money, which earns money, and so on. Time is your multiplier. Start early, the game bends to your will. Leverage, using tools, capital, technology, media or people to multiply your efforts. While you trade hours for wages, the wealthy trade systems for outcomes. Ownership. The rich don't just work for businesses, they own them. Equity, not wages, that's where wealth accumulates. Taxes. The wealthy don't just earn differently, they're taxed differently. Workers pay the highest rates, owners, investors, and asset holders use the system itself as a shield. Income streams. The average millionaire has seven streams of them. Capital gains, buying and selling stocks at a profit, interest income, which is lending money, earned income, working a job, profit income, flipping, rental income, renting a property, dividends, buying dividend paying stocks and royalties. These are your rails to income. These rules aren't secret. They're just not taught. And because they're not taught, most people don't play them. Many people ask me, Cody, nine out of 10 businesses fail, why would you even start? Because do you have another choice? If you don't play, you end up back in the race. Remember, the average person lives 78.4 years. That's 78 summers, 78 falls, 78 birthdays. That's it. It scares me to think about wasting even one. Part six, from player to architect. So how do you stop being a pawn on the board and start becoming the one who makes the rules? It starts with a mindset shift. Stop seeing your income as a paycheck. Start seeing it as fuel for freedom. If you earn wages, great, that's your seed capital. Use it to escape the consumption trap, build your emergency fund, buy yourself time to think and plan. Channel the surplus into production, invest in assets, in businesses, in ownership, even if it's just a slice. Because in the long run, ownership is the only escape from the race. The rat race doesn't end by running faster, it ends by changing the game you're playing. By realizing that action is the fundamental key to all success. Part seven, your next move. Here's your road map. Audit your relationship with money. Write down every single dollar in and out. Shine a light on the numbers you've been avoiding. That's how you stabilize, build your budget, create that fund, get out of high interest debt. Once you've shift focus, you can have stable instead of obsessing over only cutting. You start thinking about creating. Then you move to producing and owning, whether through a side hustle, a small business, or equity in your job. Find a way to own a piece of the value you create. Then you learn the rules, study compounding, learn leverage, understand taxes. The earlier you master these, the faster the game tilts in your favor. Then remember, God gave you this mindset for a reason. And you know this truth, the time is always now. Because money is not evil, it's not good, it's simply a mirror, a reflection of the choices we make. The same $100 can buy drugs or fund your kids' future. The same paycheck can be consumed on liabilities or invested into assets that compound. Same tool, different outcome. Most people spend their lives as players in a game they never designed. But you don't have to, because once you understand the hidden rules, once you realize the system was never built to make you free, you can start building your own system. And when you do, you stop being a pawn and start becoming the architect.
