By MJ DeMarco
This post summarize the book The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco and how Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime.
PART 1 – Wealth In A Wheelchair: “Get Rich Slow” is Get Rich Old
1 – The Great Deception
✓- “Get Rich Slow” demands a long life of gainful employment.
✓- “Get Rich Slow” is a losing game because it is codependent on Wall Street / Currencies / Crypto and anchored by your time.
✓- The real golden years of life are when you’re young, sentient, and vibrant.
✓- Wealth is not only money but also having good and strong relationships with your family and friends.
2 – How I Screwed “Get Rich Slow”
✓- Fame or physical talent is not a prerequisite to wealth.
✓- Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.
✓- Change can happen in an instant.
✓- Don’t fear taking roads that have not been paved by others.
✓- I wrote this book because it is something I wished I could have read when I was 20 years old.
PART 2 – Wealth Is Not A Road, But A Road Trip
3 – The Road Trip To Wealth
3 roadmaps exist:
1 – The Sidewalk : who gives the fault to external factors
2 – The Slowlane : who is employee and save 10% and invest in funds / crypto, depending on external factors
3 – The Fastlane : who create his own business and has full control on his assets
✓- Wealth is a formula, not an ingredient.
✓- Process makes millionaires. Events are residual by-products of process.
✓- To seek a “wealth chauffeur” is to seek a surrogate for process. Process cannot be outsourced, because process dawns wisdom, personal growth, strength, and ultimately, events.
4 – The Roadmaps To Wealth
✓- To force change, change must come from your beliefs, and your roadmap circumscribes those beliefs.
✓- Each roadmap is governed by a wealth equation and predisposed to a financial destination—Sidewalk to poverty, Slowlane to mediocrity, and the Fastlane to wealth.
PART 3 – Poorness: The Slowlane Roadmap
5 – The Road Most Traveled: The Sidewalk
✓- A first-class ticket to the Sidewalk is to have no financial plan.
✓- The Sidewalk’s natural gravitational pull is poverty, both in time and money.
✓- You cannot solve poor financial management with more money.
✓- You can be income rich and still ride the Sidewalk dirty.
✓- If wealth is defined by income and debt, wealth is an illusion, because it is vulnerable to potholes, detours, and “bumps in the road.” When the income disappears, so does the illusion of wealth.
✓- Poor financial management is like gambling; the house eventually wins.
6 – Is Your Wealth Poisoned?
✓- Wealth is authored by strong familial relationships, fitness and health, and freedom—not by material possessions.
✓- Unaffordable material possessions are destructive to the wealth trinity.
7 – Misuse Money And Money Will Misuse You
✓- Money doesn’t buy happiness because money is used for consumer pursuits destructive to freedom.
✓- Anything destructive to freedom is destructive to the wealth trinity.
✓- Money, properly used, can buy freedom, which can lead to happiness.
✓- Happiness stems from good health, freedom, and strong interpersonal relationships, not necessarily money.
✓- Lifestyle Servitude steals freedom, and what steals freedom, steals wealth.
✓- If you think you can afford it, you can’t.
✓- The consequence of instant gratification is the destruction of freedom, health, and choice.
8 – Lucky Bastards Play The Game
Sidewalker mindset
Belief 1: Luck is needed for wealth.
Belief 2: Wealth is an event, or an easy 1-2-3 system.
Belief 3: Others can give wealth to me.
✓- Like wealth, luck is created by process, not by event.
✓- Luck is created by increased probabilities that are improved with the process of action.
✓- If you find yourself playing the odds of “big hits,” you are event-driven, not process- driven. This mindset is conducive to the Sidewalk, not the Fastlane.
✓- “Get Rich Quick” marketing is a Fastlane because savvy marketers know that Sidewalkers place faith in events over process.
✓- Moneymaking “systems” are rarely as profitable as the act of selling them to Sidewalkers.
9 – Wealth Demands Accountability
Responsibility: It was my fault that my purse was stolen. Accountability: In the future, I will take precautions to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
✓- Hitchhikers assign control over their financial plans to others, which effectively introduces probabilities to victimhood.
✓- The Law of Victims: You can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.
✓- Responsibility owns your choices.
✓- Taking responsibility is the first step to taking the driver’s seat of your life. Accountability is the final.
PART 4 – Mediocrity: The Slowlane Roadmap
10 – The Lie You’ve Been Sold: The Slowlane
✓- The Slowlane is a natural course-correction from the Sidewalk evolving from responsibility and accountability.
✓- Wealth is best experienced when you’re young, vibrant, and able, not in the twilight of your life.
✓- The Slowlane is a plan that takes decades to succeed, requiring masterful political prowess in a corporate environment, frugality, and Wall-Street wizardry.
✓- For the Slowlaner, Saturday and Sunday is the paycheck for Monday through Friday.
✓- The default return on your time in the Slowlane is negative 60%—5-for-2.
✓- The 5-for-2 trade inherit in the Slowlane is generally fixed and cannot be manipulated, because job standards are five days a week.
✓- The predisposed destination of the Slowlane is mediocrity. Life isn’t great, but it isn’t so bad either.
11 – The Criminal Trade: Your Job
A job seals your fate into a criminal time trade: five days of life traded for two days of freedom. A job chains you to a set grade of experience. A job takes away your control. A job forces you to work with people you can’t stand. A job forces you to get paid last. A job imposes a dictatorship on your income. These limitations are counter-insurgencies to wealth.
✓- In a job, you sell your freedom (in the form of time) for freedom (in the form of money).
✓- Experience is gained in action. The environment of that action is irrelevant.
✓- Wealth accumulation is thwarted when you don’t control your primary income source.
12 – The Slowlane: Why Your Aren’t Rich
✓- Slowlane wealth is improbable due to Uncontrollable Limited Leverage (ULL) – NO CONTROL AND NO LEVERAGE.
✓- The first variable in the Slowlane wealth equation stems from a job that factors to intrinsic value which is your nominal value for each unit of your life traded.
✓- Intrinsic value is the value of your time set by the marketplace and is measured in units of time, either hourly or yearly.
✓- In the Slowlane, intrinsic value (regardless of its time measurement) is numerically inhibited because there are only 24 hours in the day (for the hourly worker), and the average lifespan is 74 years (for the salaried worker).
✓- Like the Slowlaner’s primary income source (a job), the Slowlaner’s wealth acceleration vehicle (compound interest) is also pegged to time.
✓- Like a job, compound interest is mathematically futile and cannot be manipulated. You cannot force- feed the market (or the economy) to give you phenomenal returns, year after year.
✓-Wealth cannot be accelerated when pegged to mathematics based on time.
✓- Time is your primordial fuel and it should not be traded for money.
✓- Your time should not be an expendable resource for wealth because wealth itself is composed of time.
✓- Your mortality makes time mathematically retarded for wealth creation.
✓- If you don’t control the variables inherent in your wealth universe, you don’t control your financial plan.
13 – The Futile Fight: Education
✓- Slowlaners attempt to manipulate intrinsic value by education.
✓- Indentured time is time you spend earning a living. It is the opposite of free time.
✓- Parasitic debt is debt that creates indentured time and forces work.
14 – The Hypocrisy Of The Gurus
✓- Take advice from people with a proven, successful track record of their espoused discipline.
✓- Many money gurus often suffer from a Paradox of Practice; they teach one wealth equation while getting rich in another. They’re not rich from their own teachings.
15 – Slowlane Victory: A Gamble Of Hope
12 Distinctions Between Slowlane and Fastlane Millionaires
1) Slowlane millionaires make millions in 30 years or more. Fastlane millionaires make millions in 10 years or less.
2) Slowlane millionaires need to live in middle- class homes. Fastlane millionaires can live in luxury estates.
3) Slowlane millionaires have MBAs. Fastlane millionaires hire people with MBAs.
4) Slowlane millionaires let their assets drift by market forces. Fastlane millionaires control their assets and possess the power to manipulate their value.
5) Slowlane millionaires can’t afford exotic cars. Fastlane millionaires can afford whatever they want.
6) Slowlane millionaires work for their time. Fastlane millionaires have time working for them.
7) Slowlane millionaires are employees. Fastlane millionaires hire employees.
8) Slowlane millionaires have 401(k)s. Fastlane millionaires offer 401(K)s.
9) Slowlane millionaires use index-funds and Wall Street instruments to get rich. Fastlane millionaires use them income, liquidity, and capital deployment.
10) Slowlane millionaires let other people control their income streams. Fastlane millionaires control their income streams.
11) Slowlane millionaires are cheap with money. Fastlane millionaires are cheap with time.
12) Slowlane millionaires use their house for net worth. Fastlane millionaires use their house for residency.
✓- The Slowlane has seven dangers, five of which cannot be controlled.
✓- The risk of “lifestyle” is the one risk Slowlaners will try to control.
✓- The Slowlane is predisposed to mediocrity because its mathematical universe is mediocre.
✓- Slowlaners manipulate the “expense” variable because it is the one thing they can control.
✓- Exponential income growth and expense management creates wealth—not just by curtailing expenses.
✓- You can break the Slowlane equation by exploding your intrinsic value via fame or insider corporate management.
✓- Successful Slowlaners not famous or in corporate management end in the middle . . . middle class and middle age.
✓- Slowlane millionaires are stuck in the middle class.
✓- $10 million is the new $1 million.
✓- A millionaire cannot live a millionaire lifestyle without financial discipline.
✓- Lottery winners fall into the millionaire trap and go broke because they attempt to live a “millionaire” lifestyle, not understanding that a few million doesn’t go very far.
PART 5 – Wealth: The Fastlane Roadmap
16 – Wealth’s Shortcut: The Fastlane
The Parable of Fastlane Wealth A great Egyptian pharaoh summons his twin nephews, Chuma and Azur, and commissions them to a majestic task: Build two monumental pyramids as a tribute to Egypt.
✓- The risk profile of a Fastlane strategy isn’t much different from the Slowlane, but the rewards are far greater.
✓- The Fastlane Roadmap is an alternative financial strategy predicated on Controllable Unlimited Leverage.
✓- The Fastlane roadmap is predisposed to wealth.
✓- The Fastlane Roadmap is capable of generating “Get Rich Quick” results, not to be confused with “Get Rich Easy.”
17 – Switch Teams And Playbooks
Reshape life’s focus on producing, not consuming.
Applied, this means instead of buying products on TV, sell products. Instead of digging for gold, sell shovels. Instead of taking a class, offer a class. Instead of borrowing money, lend it. Instead of taking a job, hire for jobs. Instead of taking a mortgage, hold a mortgage. Break free from consumption, switch sides, and reorient to the world as producer.
✓- Producers are indigenous to the Fastlane roadmap.
✓- Producers are the minority as are the rich, while consumers are the majority as are the poor.
✓- When you succeed as a producer, you can consume anything you want.
✓- Fastlaners are producers, entrepreneurs, innovators, visionaries, and creators.
✓- A business does not make a Fastlane—some businesses are jobs in disguise.
✓- The Fastlane wealth equation is not bound by time and its variables are unlimited and controllable.
18 – How The Rich Really Get Rich
✓- The key to the Fastlane wealth equation is to have a high speed limit, or an unlimited range of values for units sold. This creates leverage. The market for your product or service determines your upper limit.
✓- The higher your speed limit, the higher your income potential.
✓- The primary wealth accelerant for the rich is asset value, defined as appreciable assets created, founded, or bought.
✓- Wealth creation via asset value is accelerated by each industry’s average multiplier. For every dollar in net income realized, the asset value multiplies by a factor of the multiple.
✓- Your industry of specialization will determine the average multiple that determines your wealth accelerant factor. If the multiple is 3, your WAF is 300%.
✓- Liquidation events transform appreciated assets (“paper” net worth) into money (“real” net worth) that can be transformed into another passive income stream: a money system.
19 – Divorce Wealth From Time
Money trees are business systems that survive on their own. They require periodic support and nurturing but survive on their own, creating a surrogate for your time-for-money trade.
1) Rental Systems
2) Computer/Software Systems
3) Content Systems
4) Distribution Systems
5) Human Resource Systems
✓- To divorce yourself from the Slowlane’s transactional relationship of “time for money,” you need to become a producer, specifically, a business owner.
✓- Business systems break the bond between “your time for money” because they act like surrogate operatives for your time trade.
✓- If you have a passive income that exceeds all your needs and lifestyle expenses including taxes, you’re retired.
✓- Retirement can happen at any age.
✓- The fruit from a money tree is passive income.
✓- A Fastlane objective is to create a business system that survives time, exclusive of your time.
✓- The 5 money-tree seedlings are rental systems, computer systems, content systems, distribution systems, and human-resource systems.
✓- Real estate, licenses, and patents are examples of rental systems.
✓- Internet and software businesses are examples of computer systems.
✓- Authoring books, blogging, and magazines are forms of content systems.
✓- Franchising, chaining, network marketing, and television marketing are examples of distribution systems.
✓- Human resource systems can add or subtract to passivity.
✓- Human resource systems are the most expensive to manage and implement.
20 – Recruit Your Army Of Freedom Fighters
✓- One saved dollar is the seed to a money tree.
✓- A mere 5% interest on $10 million dollars is $40,000 a month in passive income.
✓- A saved dollar is the best passive income instrument.
✓- Fastlaners (the rich) don’t use compound interest or the markets to get wealthy but to create income, preserve liquidity, and deploy capital.
✓- A saved dollar is a freedom fighter added to your army.
✓- The rich leverage compound interest at its crest, applied against large sums of money.
✓- Fastlaners eventually become net lenders.
21 – The Real Law Of Wealth
Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires.
✓- The Law of Effection states that the more lives you affect or breach, both in scale or magnitude, the richer you will be.
✓- Scale translates to “units sold” of our profit variable within our Fastlane wealth equation. Magnitude translates to “unit profit” of our profit variable within our Fastlane wealth equation.
✓- The Law of Attraction is not a law, but a theory. The Law of Effection is absolute and operates exclusive of a roadmap.
✓- All lineages of self-made wealth trace back to the Law of Effection.
✓- The Law of Effection’s absoluteness comes from direct access and control (you are the athlete) versus indirect access (you are the athlete’s agent).
✓- To make millions you must serve millions in scale or a few in magnitude.
Part 6 – The Vehicle To Wealth: You
22 – Own Yourself First
✓- “Pay yourself first” is fundamentally impossible in a job.
✓- To own your vehicle (you), start a corporation that formally divorces you from the act of business. Your corporation is the body of your surrogate.
✓- The recommended Fastlane business entity is a C corp, an S corp, or an LLC.
23 – Your Life’s Steering Wheel
If you retrace poverty’s footprints you will find that poorness starts at the exact same place: choice. The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
The problem is poor diet; cholesterol is the symptom. So do not work on the symptom but on the problem himself (your choices).
Think about it in terms of an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth. When an asteroid is millions of miles out in space (representing your youthful choices) a simple one-degree change in trajectory will save the Earth from destruction. This is the power of horsepower. For us older folks, the asteroid is closer to Earth (and closer to our death), which weakens the potency of our choices. A one-degree change isn’t as effective, and for the same potency, it needs to be 10 degrees.
✓- The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
✓- The steering wheel of your life is your choices.
✓- You are exactly where you chose to be.
✓- Success is hundreds of choices that form process. Process forms lifestyle.
✓- Choice is the most powerful control you have in your life.
✓- Treasonous choices forever impact your life negatively.
✓- Your choices have significant horsepower, or trajectory into the future.
✓- The younger you are, the more potent your choices are and the more horsepower you possess.
✓- Over time, horsepower erodes as the consequences of old choices are thick and hard to bend.
24 – Wipe Your Windshield Clean
What motivates you to act and choose?
We have two types of choices:
1) Choices of perception (thought patterns)
2) Choices of action (choosing to read)
Choices of perception precede choices of action.
What language do you use in your mind? “I never … I can’t . . . If only . . .” Or do you choose better words? “It’s possible . . . I’ll overcome . . . I will . . . I can.”
2 framework to make important decisions:
1) Worse Case Consequence Analysis (WCCA) – what is the worst consequences?
2) Weighted Average Decision Matrix (WADM)
Failure perception and choices
For example, if you lost your life savings in a restaurant franchise that went bankrupt soon after you invested, your memory could be either accelerative or treasonous. Your memory and its perception could be: “Business ownership is a big risk. I’ll never do that again” or “Next time, I’m going to be selling franchises, not buying them.” The former is treasonous, while the latter is accelerative.
✓- Your choices of action manifest from your choices of perception.
✓- What you choose to perceive, or not perceive, will manifest itself to a choice of action, or inaction.
✓- You can change your choice of perception by aligning yourself with those who experience the perception as reality.
✓- Worst Case Consequence Analysis helps avoid treasonous choices.
✓- The Weighted Average Decision Matrix (WADM) can help you make better big decisions by clarifying alternatives and their internal factors.
✓- The universe has no memory, only you do.
✓- Your past can be accelerative or treasonous. You choose the classification.
✓- If your eyes are transfixed to the past, you can’t become the person you need to become in the future.
25 – Deodorize Foul Headwinds
Go into a kindergarten class and ask the kids how many of them can sing. EVERY hand will go up. Fast-forward 13 years and ask the same class of seniors the same question. Only a few hands will go up. What changed? The kindergarten kids believed they could sing because no one had told them otherwise.
Extraordinary wealth will require you to have extraordinary beliefs.
✓- The natural gravity of society is not to be exceptional, but average.
✓- Toxic relationships drain energy and detract from your goals to be extraordinary.
✓- The people in your life are like your comrades in a battle platoon. They can save you, help you, or destroy you.
✓- Good relationships are accelerative to your process, while bad relationships are treasonous.
26 – Your Primordial Fuel: Time
FACT : On any given day, $3 trillion is exchanged in the world currency markets.
✓- Fastlaners regard time as the king of all assets.
✓- Time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.
✓- Indentured time is time you spend to earn money. Free time is spent as you please.
✓- Your lifespan is made up of both free time and indentured time.
✓- Free time is bought and paid for by indentured time.
✓- Fastlaners seek to transform indentured time into free time.
✓- Parasitic debt eats free time and excretes it as indentured time.
✓- Lifestyle extravagances have two costs: the cost itself and the cost to free time.
✓- Parasitic debt has to be stopped at the source: instant gratification.
27 – Change That Dirty, Stale Oil
✓- Fastlaners start their education at graduation, if not before.
✓- A Fastlaner’s education serves to advance their business system and their money tree, not to raise intrinsic value.
✓- Fastlaner’s aren’t interested in being a cog in the wheel. They want to be the wheel.
✓- I don’t know how” is an excuse dismantled by discipline.
✓- Infinite knowledge is everywhere and it’s free. What’s missing is discipline to assimilate it.
✓- You can become an expert in any discipline not requiring physical skills.
✓- Educational recharges can occur within time blocks already allocated for other objectives.
✓- Organizers of expensive seminars take advantage of Sidewalkers and disenfranchised Slowlaners by marketing empty promises as “events.”
28 – Hit The Redline
As for failure, trust me—it is easier to live in regret of failure than in regret of never trying.
The Fastlane petitions you for this simple transformation: Make someday today.
✓- Interest is first gear. Commitment is the Redline.
✓- Hard work and commitment separates the winners from the losers.
✓- Some choose short- term mediocre comfort over long-term meteoric comfort.
✓- To live unlike everyone else, you have to do what everyone else won’t.
✓- Arm your expectations to hard work, sacrifice, and other bumps in the road. These are the land mines where the weak are removed from the road and sent back to the land of “most people.”
✓- Failure is natural to success. Expect it and learn from it.
✓- One home run could set you financially secure for your life, perhaps generations.
✓- Home runs can’t be hit in the dug out.
✓- Moronic risks have unlimited downside (long term) and limited upside (short term).
✓- Intelligent risks have unlimited upside (long term) and limited downside (short term.)
✓- There is never perfect timing and waiting for “someday” just wastes time.
PART 7 – The Roads To Wealth
29 – The Right Road Routes To Wealth
The Law of Effection says to make millions you must impact millions. How can you impact millions? In the Slowlane you explode intrinsic value, become enormously indispensable, and earn millions.
Five Fastlane Commandments, the CENTS framework.
1) The Commandment of Control
2) The Commandment of Entry
3) The Commandment of Need
4) The Commandment of Time
5) The Commandment of Scale
✓- Not all businesses are the right road. Few roads move through, or near, the Law of Effection.
✓- The best roads and the purest Fastlanes satisfythe CENTS Framework; the Five Fastlane Commandments: Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale.
30 – The Commandment Of Control
CONTROL – Fastlane drivers retain control. Those who violate the commandment do not. In general:
✓- Drivers create MLM companies; they don’t join them.
✓- Drivers sell franchises; they don’t buy them.
✓- Drivers offer affiliate programs; they don’t join them.
✓- Drivers run hedge funds; they don’t invest in them.
✓- Drivers sell stock; they don’t buy stock.
✓- Drivers offer drop- shipping; they don’t use drop-shipping.
✓- Drivers offer employment; they don’t get employed.
✓- Drivers accept rents and royalties; they don’t pay rents and royalties.
✓- Drivers sell licenses; they don’t buy them.
✓- Drivers sell IPO shares; they don’t buy them.
✓- Drivers don’t join the hottest trend, they serve the hottest trend.
✓- Hitchhikers relinquish control of their business to a Fastlaner.
✓- There is a difference between “good” money and “big” money. Hitchhikers can make good money while Fastlaners make big money. Sometimes legendary money.
✓- In a driver/hitchhiker relationship, the driver retains control and the hitchhiker is at the driver’s mercy. Hitchhikers are subordinated to someone else’s Fastlane plan.
✓- Make the world your habitat of play in an organization you control.
✓- Network marketing has little to do with entrepreneurship but more to do with sales, networking, training, and motivation.
✓- Network marketing fails both the Commandments of Control and Entry, and sometimes, Need.
✓- Network marketers are soldiers in a Fastlaner’s army.
✓- Network marketing is a powerful distribution system. As a Fastlaner, seek to own one, not join one.
✓- Network marketing can have some excellent education value in the realm of sales, motivation, and team building.
✓- If you can succeed at network marketing, you should be able to succeed in a Fastlane venture.
31 – The Commandment Of Entry
ENTRY – When your truck-driving cousin says you need to invest in this great cryptocurrency altcoin because it’s up 250%, it’s time to get out and stay out.
If you want to live unlike everyone, you can’t be like everyone.
✓- The Commandment of Entry states that as entry barriers fall, competition rises and the road weakens.
✓- Easy access roads carry more traffic. More traffic generates higher competition, and higher competition creates lower margins for the participants.
✓- Businesses with weak entry often lack control and operate in saturated marketplaces. Exceptionalism is required to overcome weak entry barriers.
✓- Access to a business road should be a process with a toll, not an event.
✓- “Everyone” consists of the general populous and is served by the mainstream media.
✓- If everyone were wealthy, “everybody is doing it” would work. And if everyone is wealthy, then no one is wealthy.
✓- “Everyone is doing it” is a signal to overbought conditions and the entrance of “dumb money.”
32 – The Commandment Of Need
NEED
– Businesses that solve needs and provide value win.
– Businesses that solve problems win profits.
People care about what your business can do for them. How will it help them? What’s in it for them? Will it solve their problem? Make their life easier? Provide them with shelter? Save them money? Educate them? Make them feel something? Tell me, why on God’s green Earth should I give your business money? What value are you adding to my life?
Never start a business just to make money. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs. Let me repeat that, because it’s the most important thing in this book: Stop thinking about business in terms of your selfish desires, whether it’s money, dreams or “do what you love.” Instead, chase needs, problems, pain points, service deficiencies, and emotions.
Money is like a mischievous cat; if you chase it around the neighborhood, it eludes you. It hides up a tree, behind the rose bush, or in the garden. However, if you ignore it and focus on what attracts the cat, it comes to you and sits in your lap.
Solve needs massively and money massively attracts.
=> Make them feel better. (entertainment, music, video games)
=> Help them solve a problem.
=> Educate them.
=> Make them look better (health, nutrition, clothing, makeup).
=> Give them security (housing, safety, health).
=> Raise a positive emotion (love, happiness, laughter, self-confidence).
=> Satisfy appetites, from basic (food) to the risqué (sexual).
=> Make things easier.
=> Enhance their dreams and give hope.
Do what you love doesn’t work if doesn’t respect the 2 following requirement.
For “do what you love” to work, you need two things:
1) Your love must solve a need and
2) You must be exceptional at it.
One of the many destinations of the Fastlane is to remove the confirmation of money from your “do what you love” activity.
The motivational fuel for the Fastlane is not love, but passion—passion for your future vision and passion from personal growth. If you have a passion for a specific goal, you’ll do anything for it. I had a passion for Lamborghinis and was willing to do anything for it. Pick up dog shit, mop floors, work at 3 a.m.—whatever it was going to take, I had the motivation to do it.
The Fastlane isn’t a destination but a personal journey.
✓- The Commandment of Need states that businesses that solve needs win. Needs can be pain points, service gaps, unsolved problems, or emotional disconnects.
✓- Ninety percent of all new businesses fail because they are based on selfish internal needs, not external market needs.
✓- No one cares about your selfish desires for dreams or money; people only want to know what your business can do for them.
✓- Money chasers haven’t broken free from selfishness, and their businesses often follow their own selfish needs.
✓- People vote for your business with their money.
✓- Chase money and it will elude you. However, if you ignore it and focus on what attracts money, you will draw it to yourself.
✓- Help one million people and you will be a millionaire.
✓- For money to follow “Do what you love,” your love must solve a need and you must be exceptional at it.
✓- “Do what you love” sets the stage for crowded marketplaces with depressed margins.
✓- When you have the financial resources, you can “do what you love” and not get paid for it, nor do you have to be good at it.
✓- Slowlaners feed “do what you love” with “do what you hate.” Five days of hate for two days of love.
✓- “Doing what you love” for money can endanger your love.
✓- Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane success.
✓- Having a passionate “why” can transform work into joy.
✓- “Doing what you love” usually leads to the violation of the Commandment of Need.
✓- The right road for you is one that will converge with your dreams.
33 – The Commandment Of Time
TIME – The Commandment of Time asks:
✓- Can this business be automated and systematized to operate while I’m absent?
✓- Are my margins thick enough to hire human resource seedlings?
✓- Can my operation benefit from the introduction of a money tree seedling?
✓- How can I get this business to operate exclusive of my time?
The problem with most business roads is that they are inhospitable for money trees simply because they fail the Commandment of Time. The seeds aren’t accessible and those seeds that are accessible, won’t take to the soil.
✓- A business attached to your time is a job.
✓- A business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time.
✓- To satisfy the Commandment of Time, start with a business that uses a money-system seedling, or introduce one.
34 – The Commandment Of Scale
SCALE – How do you know if your business (or potential business) honors the Commandment of Scale? Ask:
=> Can the net income of this business scale limitlessly, say, from $2,000 per month to $200,000?
=> Can the asset value of this business scale into the millions?
=> Can this business impact millions? Or does it impact hundreds? Is its customer pool the world or a small community in the city?
=> Can this business be replicated and expanded beyond the local trading area by franchising, chaining, or additional units?
=> Best-case scenario, what is the units-sold potential? One hundred or one hundred million?
=> Best-case scenario, how pliable is unit profit? Does it have magnitude?
✓- Your total pool of customers determines your habitat. The larger the habitat, the greater the potential for wealth.
✓- A business can be a singles or a home-run-based business. Its strength is determined by scale, which is derived by habitat.
✓- The Fastlane wealth equation is disarmed when you violate the Commandment of Scale.
✓- Scale is achieved in reach (units sold) and/or magnitude (unit profit).
✓- The Law of Effection is the primary conduit to wealth, which can be road-blocked by scale, magnitude, or source.
✓- Effection consequences trickle up to owners and producers. Breaking scale or magnitude indirectly in an uncontrolled entity is not a guarantee of wealth.
✓- To gain access to Effection, you have to break the barrier of scale or magnitude in an entity you control.
✓- Scale, magnitude, or source deficiencies create governors on the speed of wealth creation.
35 – Rapid Wealth: The Interstates
Fastlane Purity: Five Commandments :
✓- Thou shalt not invest in a needless business.
✓- Thou shalt not trade time for money.
✓- Thou shalt not operate on a limited scale.
✓- Thou shalt not relinquish control.
✓- Thou shalt not let a business startup be an event over process.
The three Interstates are:
1) Internet
Subscription based
Content-based
Lead generation
Social Networks / Communities / Forums
Brokerage Systems
Advertising
E-Commerce
2) Innovation
Manufacture then important to well Distribute
3) Intentional Iteration
Each interstate road is an umbrella for dozens of other roads. Put all three together and you have hundreds of roads available for your travel.
✓- The best Fastlanes satisfy all five Commandments: Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale.
✓- Assuming a need-based premise, the Internet is the fastest interstate, because it overwhelmingly satisfies all Commandments.
✓- Innovation can be any variety of open roads: authoring, inventing, or services.
✓- Inventing success needs coupling with distribution.
✓- A singles-based business is scaled to a home-run business by intentional iteration. With iteration, scale is conquered.
36 – Find Your Open Road
Successful businesses rarely evolve from some legendary idea. Nope, successful entrepreneurs take existing concepts and improve them. They take poorly met needs and solve them better. Skip the big idea and go for the big execution.
Years ago, what if Sergey Brin and Larry Page looked at the Internet landscape and said “Gee, there are plenty of search engines out there—Yahoo, Snap, Alta Vista—why start Google? It’s being done!” Thankfully, they didn’t, and now Google is the most used search engine, and because of it, Brin and Page are now billionaires.
Poorly met needs are open roads often appearing closed. Successful businesses take existing ideas, services, and products and simply make them better, or spin them in new directions.
Open roads, needs and opportunity come prefaced with “code words” or phrases that scream “This is an opportunity!”
When you catch yourself (or someone else) in these words, you’ve just uncovered a possible opportunity. Here are the most common phrases:
✓- “I hate . . .” What do you hate? Solve the hate, and there’s your open road.
✓- “I don’t like . . .” What don’t you like? Remove the dislike, and there’s your open road.
✓- “This frustrates me . . .” What is frustrating? Remove the frustration, and there’s your open road.
✓- “Why is this like this?” I don’t know, why is it? Remove the “why,” and there’s your open road.
✓- “Do I have to?” Do you? Remove the “have to.” There’s your open road.
✓- “I wish there was . . .” What do you wish? If you wish, others wish too. Make wishes come true, and there’s your open road.
✓- “I’m tired of . . .” What are you tired of? Fix someone’s tiresomeness, and there’s your open road.
✓- “This sucks . . .” What sucks? Remove or reduce suckage, and there’s your open road.
Failures that drive you into new directions are often the most productive forces for invention.
✓- Opportunities are rarely about inventing breakthroughs, but about performance gaps, small inconveniences, and pain points.
✓- Competition should not impede your road. Competition is everywhere, and your objective should be to “do it better.” Fastlane success resides in execution, not in the idea.
✓- The world’s most successful entrepreneurs didn’t have a blockbuster ideas; they just took existing concepts and made them better, or exposed them to more people.
✓- Opportunity is exposed in your language and your thought processes, as well as other people’s language. Failure cracks open new roads.
✓- Quitting only happens when you give up on your dream.
37 – Give Your Road A Destination
What is the price for the freedom and lifestyle you want? Find out with this four-step process:
1) Define the Lifestyle: What do you want?
2) Assess the Cost: How much do your dreams cost?
3) Set the Targets: Set the money system and business income targets.
4) Make It Real: Fund it and open it!
✓- The Fastlane is the means to your end because dreams cost money.
✓- Conquer big goals by breaking them down to their smallest component.
✓- Daily saving reinforces your relationship with money; it is your passive system that buys freedom and another soldier added to your army.
✓- A money system isn’t used to grow wealth but to grow income. Growing wealth should be left to your Fastlane road.
✓- You will struggle to build a financial empire if you are financially illiterate.
✓- “Live below your means” is relevant at any income level.
✓- For the Fastlaner, “Live below your means” means to expand your means.
✓- A financial adviser doesn’t solve financial illiteracy and literacy is insurance.
✓- Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.
PART 8 – Your Speed: Accelerate Wealth
38 – The Speed Of Success
You treat each business function like a chess piece. How they’re played will fate your Fastlane for speed or aimless drifting.
– The King: Your execution
– The Queen: Your marketing
– The Bishop: Your customer service
– The Knight: Your product
– The Rook: Your people
– The Pawn: Your ideas.
An idea is the event, the execution is the process.
✓- Speed is the transformation of ideas to execution.
✓- Most people let powerful information expire and become worthless.
✓- Successful Fastlane businesses are run multi-dimensionally, like a game of chess. One-dimensional businesses focus on price only.
✓- Execution divides winners and losers from their ideas.
✓- In business, execution is process. Ideas are events.
✓- Ideas are potential speed. Execution is actual speed.
✓- Others share your blockbuster idea. He who thinks the idea owns nothing. He who executes the idea owns everything.
✓- Real money and momentum is created when an idea (potential speed) is matched with execution (accelerator pressure).
✓- An idea is neurological flatulence. Execution makes it smell like a rose.
39 – Burn The Business Plan, Ignite Execution
Interview any successful entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that they started off with intention A and ended at intention B. They sell product X and ultimately end selling product Y.
If you want investors, get out and execute.
– Create a prototype.
– Create a brand.
– Create a track record that others can see or touch.
– Dive into process.
When you have a physical manifestation of an idea, investors will open their wallets. Heck, be good enough and they will be fighting to give you money.
✓- The world gives clues to the direction you should be moving.
✓- Business plans are useless because they are ideas on steroids.
✓- As soon as the world interacts with your ideas, your business plan is invalidated.
✓- The marketplace will steer you into directions that were previously unplanned for.
✓- The best business plan in the world is a track record of execution—it legitimizes the business plan.
✓- If you have a track record of execution, suddenly people will want to see your business plan.
✓- If you want your business to get funded, take action and create something that reflects tangible execution.
✓- Investors are more likely to invest in something tangible and real; not ideas dissected endlessly on paper.
40 – Pedestrians Will Make Your Rich
Complaints are the world’s whispers hinting the direction you should be moving.
There are four types of complaints:
1) Complaints of change
2) Complaints of expectation
3) Complaints of void and
4) Complaints of fraud.
Solve complaints that add the most value while helping the most. As a business owner you must remember that, while you don’t have a boss, the person who pays your rent is your customer and they always should be heard— but sometimes ignored.
SUCS event: a Superior Unexpected Customer Service
When you violate your client’s customer service expectation profile positively, you turn your customers into loyal, repeat buyers, and ultimately, disciples of your business.
To create raving customers, you must exceed satisfaction.
None of these people worked for me. Yet if you visited my website’s “Contact” or “About Us” page, they were listed as employees in high profile positions: CTO, business development, or Web Producer. These people weren’t employees, but it looked like my staff was big, and growing.
I wanted to look big but act small.
My other purpose for “looking big” was to beat my competition before they even started. When someone (or some company) wants to set up shop and compete with you, they investigate you first. They look at your website, see what you’re doing and the prices you’re charging. Then they decide if they want to invest time money and enter the space.
✓- Complaints are valuable insights into your customers’ minds.
✓- Complaints of change are difficult to decipher and often require additional data to validate or invalidate.
✓- Complaints of expectation expose operational problems in either your business, or in your marketing strategy.
✓- Complaints of void expose unmet needs, raise the value of your product or service, and expose new revenue opportunities.
✓- Great customer service is as simple as violating your customer’s low expectation in the positive.
✓- Poor service gaps are Fastlane opportunities.
✓- Satisfied customers can be human resource systems who promote your business for free.
✓- Satisfied customers have a dual residual effect: Repeat business and new business via discipleship.
✓- Your customer’s satisfaction holds the key to everything you selfishly want.
✓- Looking big but acting small sets up customer service expectation violations in the positive.
✓- Looking big can scare away potential competitors.
41 – Throw Hijackers To The Curb
1) A SUCS customer service philosophy must be delivered by your employees.
2) Spectacular product features can’t overcome poor service.
Your employees drive the public’s perception of your company.
✓- A business partnership is as important as a marriage.
✓- A good accountant and attorney will save you thousands, perhaps millions.
✓- Accountants and attorneys have the keys to your castle; make sure you trust them fully because they have the power to right or wrong you.
✓- Unmitigated trust exposes you to unmitigated risk.
✓- Unverified trust can lead to uncontrollable consequences.
✓- Your employees communicate the public’s perception of your company.
✓- Fanatical customer service can overcome shortcomings, but fanatical features can’t overcome poor customer service.
✓- Customer service philosophy is delivered from human interactions—not ambitious mission statements on a wall plaque in the CEO’s office.
42 – Be Someone’s Savior
If your eyes are glued to the competition’s butt, guess what? Your eyes aren’t on the road ahead. If you’re following, you aren’t leading, and if you aren’t leading, you’re not innovating.
Gloating over your competition should serve only one purpose: To find weaknesses and then be better at that weakness within your own operation. To the customer, this difference will be interpreted as better value. And better value equals more buyers won.
✓- Commoditization occurs when you get into business based on a false premise—“I want to own a business” or “I know how to do this, so I’ll start a business doing it.”
✓- If you are too busy copying or watching your competition, you’re not innovating.
✓- Use your competition to exploit their weaknesses, differentiate, and skew value.
43 – Build Brands, Not Businesses
The queen is the most powerful piece in chess and it is also in business. Marketing can convince people to buy mediocre products.
People are loyal to brands and relationships, not corporations or businesses.
The first step at building a brand is to have a Unique Selling Proposition or a USP.
My USP was powerful: “No-risk advertising: If we send you nothing, you pay nothing.”
How do you develop a solid USP for your company? There are five steps.
Step 1: Uncover the Benefit(s)
Get into business for the right reason: to add or create value, solve problems or fill a need.
Step 2: Be Unique
USPs should use powerful action verbs that create desire and urgency. “Lose weight” should be changed to “Obliterate fat” or “Shred pounds.” “Grow your business” should be dropped in favor of “Explode revenues” or “Shatter sales records.”
Step 3: Be Specific and Give Evidence
Domino’s Pizza didn’t say “Delivered on time,” they said, “Delivered within 30 minutes or it’s free.” It was a specific action and evidence of that action.
Step 4: Keep it Short, Clear, and Concise
Step 5: Integrate Your USP into ALL Marketing Materials
Step 6: Make It Real
How to Rise above the Noise There are five ways to get your message above the noise:
1) Polarize
2) Arouse emotions
3) Be risqué
4) Encourage interaction and
5) Be unconventional
Risqué – Sex gets above the noise. Men see the woman’s busty chest in the video preview and think, “Oooh, I gotta check that out,” while women are curious—“OMG, who is doing a video in a bikini top?” It’s almost a mix of polarization and sex.
Emotions – They launched a powerful marketing campaign that unleashed emotions; their commercials featured caged, abused animals combined with a tender, heartfelt soundtrack.
Interactive – On Facebook, the most popular applications are “surveys” and “questionnaires” because people love narcissism. My favorite movie is The Usual Suspects! I love pizza! I own a poodle! People love to talk about themselves, and if you entwine that into your marketing plan, you will improve the response to your product or service.
Interactive – When your potential customers break down their personal barriers and expose pieces of themselves, a relationship builds making it easier to sell. A relationship sells more than an anonymous corporate entity.
It’s ironic: To succeed a Fastlane we must forsake selfishness yet satisfy the selfishness of others.
People don’t care about you, your business, your product or your dreams; they want to help themselves and their family. It’s human nature. Therefore, our marketing messages must focus on benefits, not features.
As consumers, we buy things to solve needs. We participate in transactions to fill voids.
You don’t buy a drill; you buy a hole.
You don’t buy a dress; you buy an image.
You don’t buy a Toyota; you buy reliability.
You don’t buy a vacation; you buy an experience.
If you want to sell anything, translate features to benefits. A four-step process accomplishes this.
1) Switch places.
2) Identify features.
3) Identify advantages.
4) Translate advantages into benefits.
Once you identify your buyer, ask: What do they want? What do they fear? What problem do they need solved? Or do they just want to “feel” something?
The more expensive your price, the higher its perceived value. The cheaper your price, well, the cheaper it will be perceived. Price isn’t just a number that tells someone cost. It conveys value and worth.
As a marketer you have to drill into your buyer’s mind and get your brand differentiated. Own the consumer’s mind and you own the consumer.
✓- Marketing and branding (the queen) is the most powerful Fastlane tool.
✓- Businesses survive. Brands thrive.
✓- Businesses have identity crises, brands don’t. Identity crises force business owners into price commoditization.
✓- Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) is a brand key and differentiates your company from the rest.
✓- People have a natural desire to be unique and different. ✓- Marketing success requires messages to break above the noise, or advertising clutter.
✓- Polarization is a great above-the-noise tool if your product targets a polarized audience—usually politics, minority opinions, and even sports teams.
✓- Sex sells and always draws eyeballs. (But can tarnish your brand image.)
✓- Consumers make buying decisions based on emotions before practicality.
✓- If you can arouse audience emotions, convincing customers to buy is easier.
✓- People like talking about themselves. If you can incorporate interaction or “try before you buy” into your campaigns, you will have better success.
✓- To be unconventional means to first isolate and identify what is conventional, then doing the opposite, or interrupting that convention.
✓- Consumers are selfishly motivated. Always target your messages toward the predisposition of “What’s in it for me?”
✓- Features are translated to benefits when you switch positions from producer to consumer, identify the feature’s advantages, and extrapolate those advantages into a specific result.
✓- Price implicitly conveys value and worth.
✓- Don’t allow your own perception of price lead your brand to mediocrity.
44 – Choose Monogamy Over Polygamy
✓- Tekel Syndrome sufferers are polygamist- opportunists who opportunity-hop.
✓- A weak business commitment commits you to weak assets. Weak assets do not accelerate wealth.
✓- The most successful entrepreneurs lived and breathed their business with 100% committed.
✓- Successful business monogamy can lead to successful business polygamy, a diversification into many passionate interests and investments.
✓- Save the “I have ten businesses” until after you sell one company for millions.
45 – Put It Together: Supercharge Your Wealth Plan
F-A-S-T-L-A-N-E S-U-P-E-R-C-H-A-R-G-E-R, which is an acronym for the Fastlane process.
1. Formula (Fastlane supercharger) Wealth is a Formula and a systematic process of beliefs, choices, actions, and habits that form a lifestyle. Wealth is a process, not an event.
2. Admit (fAstlane supercharger) Admit that the preordained path to wealth, “Get Rich Slow,” is fundamentally flawed because of Uncontrollable Limited Leverage, weak mathematics predicated on time (Wealth = Job + Markets). Admit that “Get Rich Quick” exists. Admit that “no plan” is not a good plan. Admit that luck is the residue of engagement.
3. Stop and Swap (faStlane supercharger) Stop following the wrong roadmaps. Stop doing what you’ve been doing. Stop selling your soul for a weekend. Stop thinking that 401(K)s and indexed-funds will make you rich. Swap ineffective roadmaps for the Fastlane roadmap. Swap your allegiances from consumer to producer.
4. Time (fasTlane supercharger) Time is the king asset of the Fastlane—specifically, free time. Invest in activities that pay more than money, they pay free time. Avoid time thieves, such as parasitic debt that converts free time into indentured time. Invest time into a business system that can transform indentured time into free time. Make decisions with time as a key decision factor.
5. Leverage (fastLane supercharger) Leverage controllable and unlimited mathematics to create wealth. There is no leverage within the Slowlane wealth equation, an equation predicated on time (hourly pay, annual salary, annualized return, years invested). If you can’t control the mathematics that underscore your wealth, nor accelerate them into large numbers, you can’t control your financial plan. Leverage is harnessed by a system that does the work for you.
6. Assets and Income (fastlAne supercharger) Wealth is accelerated by exploding income and Asset value via a business that can be systemized and eventually sold in a liquidation event. Live below your means but seek to expand your means by focusing on income while simultaneously controlling expenses. Exponential growth of income and asset value, not slashing expenses, creates millionaires.
7. Number (fastlaNe supercharger) What’s your Number? How much money will you need to live your dream lifestyle? Determine your number, break it down by the penny, and make it real today. Start saving your loose change, open a brokerage account, and put a chart on your wall that continually monitors your number’s progress. Make your dream lifestyle real by posting photos of that life at your workspace. For example, if you want a cabin on a mountain creek, find a picture of that vision and put it on computer so you have to see it every day. Make your future visions real and force them into your psyche so you’re constantly reminded. Make those dreams tangible and inescapable!
8. Effection (fastlanE supercharger) Grace Effection and you shall be graced with wealth. The Law of Effection states, “The more people whose lives you affect in an environment you control, the more money you will make.” Impact millions and you will make millions. When you solve needs on a massive scale, money flows into your life. Money reflects value.
9. Steer (fastlane Supercharger) Life’s Steering is choice. At some point, you must commit to the Fastlane ideology, and that commitment forms your process. Wealth is not one choice (event), just like you cannot choose to lose 100 pounds and suddenly wake up 100 pounds lighter. How you steer determines whether the Fastlane is a lifestyle, a hobby, or a lottery ticket. To enforce good decisions at the extremes, deploy WCCA and WADM. Decision horsepower is strongest in youth and bleeds with age. Examine your past choices. Why are you where you are? What has been treasonous to your life? Why are you drowning in debt? If you don’t rectify the mistakes of your past choices you will be destined to repeat them. Behavior change begins with a reflection of your past decisions and modifying them for the Fastlane mindset. Become responsible, followed by accountable.
10. Uncouple (fastlane sUpercharger) Officially Uncouple from the Slowlane wealth equation by creating your business structure in a favorable Fastlane entity: a C- or S-Corporation, or an LLC. Thereafter, your entity is the body of your surrogate business system. It “pays itself first” and the government last. It survives time separate from your time. It is your first step at creating an asset.
11. Passion & Purpose (fastlane suPercharger) With a business entity and a dollar figure that outlines your dream life, you will need a Passion and a Purpose to fuel you into habitual action. Don’t confuse “passion” with “do what you love.” Passion burns your soul and drives you to do whatever it takes. Passion revs you with excitement and enrages you with discontent. Some passions are selfish (I want a Lamborghini) and other passions are selfless (I want to help orphaned children). It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as the passion burns hot enough to burn a hole in your pants and gets you stoked for process.
12. Educate (fastlane supErcharger) Education begins at graduation. Pledge to never stop learning. What you know now is not enough to become the person you need to be tomorrow. Seek Fastlane knowledge that fosters the construction and operation of business systems in an environment that you control. Get to the library and get on the Internet. Information is the oil on your financial journey. Ensure daily reading in short bursts by leveraging existing time blocks often squandered: the train, the plane, while exercising, on lunch break, an hour in the morning before work, or while waiting at the post office.
13. Road (fastlane supeRcharger) Get onto a Fastlane Road. But don’t worry if you can’t decide which road; the road can pick you. Train your mind to see needs, problems, and ways to improve things. Observe your thoughts and language, because they expose unmet needs, or needs met poorly. You don’t have to find the next breakthrough; just find an improvement opportunity, a pain-point, or a service gap, and solve it. Many of the best businesses in the world are based on products that already existed; the owners solved the problem better or more efficiently. When you focus on market gaps, roads open. Yes, the road chooses you.
14. Control (fastlane superCharger) Control your financial plan as this refers to the Commandment of Control. Engage in an organization that you fully control, from pricing to marketing to operations. Fastlane entrepreneurs don’t cede control over critical business functions to hierarchical control structures, because they are the control structure. Swim as a shark, not a guppy.
15. Have (fastlane supercHarger) HAVE what others NEED and money will flow into your life. This reflects the Commandment of Need. You can’t explode your income by chasing money. Stop chasing money, because it eludes those who try. Instead, focus on what attracts money, and that is a business that solves needs. Money comes from providing value. Cast aside selfishness and seek to HAVE what your fellow man WANTS. When you do, money flows into your life because money is attracted to those who have what others want, desire, crave, or need.
16. Automate (fastlane superchArger) Automate your business and honor the Commandment of Time. Get your time detached from your business. The best passive-income money-tree seedlings are money systems, rental systems, computer systems, content systems, distribution systems, and human resource systems. The key to automation in any business lies in these seedlings.
17. Replicate (fastlane superchaRger) Replicate your system and honor the Commandment of Scale. Get on a playing field where home runs can be hit. To make millions, you must impact millions. To impact millions, you must be on a field capable of affecting millions! Can your product, service, process be replicated on a global scale to tap the Law of Effection?
18. Grow (fastlane supercharGer) Grow your business by treating it multi- dimensionally, like a game of chess. Build a brand, not a business. Treat customers like your boss and reposition complaints to opportunities. Listen to the world as they offer the best directional clues. Resist commoditization. Differentiate yourself from the competition. Get above the noise. Focus on one business and one business only.
19. Exit (fastlane superchargEr) Have an Exit strategy. Full passivity accomplished by a money system is one Fastlane destination. Money systems are best funded by liquidation events of massive asset values. Know when it’s time to liquidate your assets, transforming paper money into real money. Know when it’s time to get off the horse and learn to ride a new one.
20. Retire, Reward, or Repeat (fastlane superchargeR) After liquidating your asset(s), Retire or Repeat. Regardless of which, Reward yourself for milestones met along the journey. Sell your first product? Celebrate! Go to dinner, buy a cigar, drink a beer. Break $100,000 in net worth? Treat yourself to something nice. Book a joint-venture deal? Celebrate with an indulgence. Go over $1 million? Take a nice vacation. Break $10 million? Buy a Lamborghini.
THE 40 FASTLANE COMMANDMENTS
I SHALL . . .
1. Not dismiss “Get Rich Quick” as improbable.
2. Not allow the Slowlane to bury my dreams.
3. Not allow Slowlane prognosticators to contaminate my truth with their dogma.
4. Not ordain the Slowlane as the plan, but let it be a part of the plan.
5. Not sell my soul for a weekend.
6. Not expect nor seek a chauffeur to wealth.
7. Not trade my time for money.
8. Not put time in control over my financial plan.
9. Not forsake control over my financial plan.
10. Not demote time as abundant and effervescent.
11. Not assign faith to events, but to process.
12. Not take advice from gurus who preach one roadmap, while getting rich using another
13. Not use compound interest for wealth, but for income.
14. Not disrespect the passivity of a dollar.
15. Not cease learning at graduation, but start it.
16. Not impose the burdens of parasitic debt into my life.
17. Not play on Team Consumer, but switch to Team Producer.
18. Not dismiss the plausibility of my dreams.
19. Not chase a path of money, but a path of need.
20. Not fuel my motivation by love, but by passion, purpose, and why.
21. Not focus on my expenses, but on my income.
22. Not pay myself last, but first.
23. Not do what everyone does.
24. Not trust everyone, but allow trust to be proven.
25. Not relinquish control over my business.
26. Not hitchhike, but seek to drive.
27. Not operate within limited scales and in tiny habitats.
28. Not dishonor the horsepower of my choices.
29. Not swim as a guppy in a pool, but as a shark in the oceans.
30. Not consume first, but produce first, and consume later.
31. Not partake in barrier-free or entry-weak businesses.
32. Not invest in other people’s brands, but in my own.
33. Not give credence to ideas, but to execution.
34. Not forsake my customer for other stakeholders.
35. Not build a business, but a brand.
36. Not focus my marketing messages on features, but benefits.
37. Not be a polygamist opportunist: Focus!
38. Not operate my business like checkers, but chess.
39. Not live above my means, but seek to expand my means.
40. Not live without the insurance of financial literacy.