"The Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ DeMarco

• Success is a journey, and it can’t be outsourced to India in a four-hour workweek.
• All self-made multimillionaires create their wealth by a carefully orchestrated process.
• Wealth is a process, not an event.
• Wealth eludes most people because they are preoccupied with events while disregarding process. Without process, there is no event.
• All events of wealth are preceded by process, a back story of trial, risk, hard work, and sacrifice.
• Execution is the ability to go from idea to implementation.
• Expect a price to be paid. Expect risk and sacrifice. Expect bumps in the road.
• The Fastlane process demands sacrifices that few make, to resolve to live like few can.
• If you want to change your life, change your choices. To change your choices you must change your belief system.
• Beliefs are powerful mechanisms that drive action, whether true or not.
• A Sidewalker exists in a state of one-something-from broke. On the sidewalk, you’re always “one something” from being homeless, bankrupt, or back living in your parent's basement.
• You can’t medicate poor money management with more money.
• Wealth is not authored by material possessions, money, or “stuff”, but by what I call the three fundamental “F’s”: family (relationships), fitness (health), and freedom (choice). Within this wealth trinity is where you will find true wealth and, yes, happiness.
• By creating Lifestyle Servitude, more money becomes destructive to the wealth trinity: family, fitness, and freedom.
• The World Value Survey concluded that “consumerism” is the leading obstacle to happiness.
• Normal is modern-day slavery.
• If you’re held hostage to your lifestyle, you aren’t wealthy, because you lack freedom.
• The more stuff you buy that you can’t afford, the longer your jail sentence becomes.
• Affordability is when you don’t have to think about it.
• Instead of you owning your stuff, your stuff owns you.
• Process creates events that others see as luck.
• To take advantage of The Millionaire Fastlane understand that luck is a product of process, action, work, and being “out there” you stand a chance at being in the right place at the right time.
• Luck is the residue of process.
• The Law of Victims says you can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to some capable of making you a victim.
• Stop being a victim be taking responsibility, followed by accountability.
• The Slowlane is a lifetime wager that a sacrificial today will yield a wealthier tomorrow.
• You can either live rich young or live rich old while risking death along the way. The choice is yours and it shouldn't be a contest. Rich at 25 beats the snot out of rich at 65 years old.
• Life does not begin on Friday night and end Monday morning.
• If you want to escape the Slowlane, find wealth and freedom fast, you’ve got to dump the job. Let me repeat. Dump the damn job!
• If you’re shackled to a job, you’re engaged to a glorified exchange of your time (your life) for pieces of paper that grant you freedom. You sell your freedom to get freedom.
• Jobs suck because they ravenously consume TIME. At a job, TIME TRADE is central to how you make money.
• In a job, you sell your life for money. If you work you get paid. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
• I learned more as an entrepreneur in two months than I did working 10 years at dozens of dead-end jobs.
• The problem with a specialized skill set is, it narrows your useful value to a confined set of market place needs.
• Experience comes from what you do in life, not from what you do in a job.
• You don’t need a job to get experience.
• If you don’t control your income, you don’t control your financial plan. If you don’t control your financial plan, you don't’ control your freedom.
• There is neither safety nor security in a job.
• The Slowlaner’s primary income source comes from “a job,” while the wealth acceleration vehicle comes from “market investments” like 401Ks and mutual funds.
• Small numbers do not make millionaires.
• Wealth creation via compound interest requires the passing of time and lots of it.
• Compound interest and a job have the same disease: the sinful and gluttonous consumption of your time while forsaking control.
• If you want to get rich, you have to control and leverage the variables in your financial plan--any financial plan without control immediately disintegrates into a plan of hope.
• The problem with formal education used to raise intrinsic value is that it’s ungodly expensive in time and money.
• A preoccupation to become “highly educated” could be a Trojan horse to your freedom.
• A Paradox of Practice exists when someone promotes a moneymaking strategy but that strategy is not what made him or her rich. In other words, they’re not practitioners of their own advice.
• Economic recessions expose the Slowlane as a risky fraud with lifetime ramifications.
• The Slowlane is predisposed to mediocrity because the numbers are always mediocre.
• The Slowlane is risky because its variables are uncontrollable and leverage is absent.
• Exploding income and controlling expenses creates wealth. Income explosion and expense control create wealth.
• Extreme talent is paid extremely well.
• A millionaire is not rich. Five million is the old one million.
• Time is the most important asset I have, far exceeding money.
• The Slowlane is a job: your hard work traded for your employer’s cash.
• The Fastlane is about building a better system, a better contraption, a better product, or a better “something” that will leverage your work.
• From the day you were born, you were baptized to play for Team Consumer. You’ve been conditioned to demand: to want products, to need products, to buy products, and of course, to seek out the cheapest of those products.
• The winning team is Team Producer. Reshape life’s focus on producing, not consuming. Become a producer first and a consumer second.
• Once you succeed as a producer, you can consume anything you want with little consequence because you’ll be rich.
• To consume richly, produce richly first.
• To switch teams and become a producer, you need to be an entrepreneur and an innovator. You need to be a visionary and a creator. You need to give birth to a business and offer the word value.
• The primary wealth accelerant of the rich boils down to one concept: appreciable and controllable assets.
• Asset value is simply the worth of any property you on that has marketplace value.
• Fastlaners accelerate wealth by building cash-flowing assets that can be sold in the marketplace to realize gains.
• There are five business seedlings to money trees.
• rental systems
• computer/software systems
• content systems
• distribution systems
• human resource systems
• Rental systems are powerful money trees because they are high on the passivity scale and survive time.
• Software, when tapped into potent distribution, can be replicated to millions. It scales without significant degradation to passivity.
• Change creates millionaires. Those who observe and take advantage of change will be the new millionaires and billionaires.
• Content survives time.
• A distribution system is any structure or organization designed to move products to the masses.
• Content systems are systems of information.
• Leases, royalty payments, and licensing are other forms of “rental systems” that can produce recurring monthly income.
• Computers are miraculous inventions and fertile seeds to money trees. They work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they don’t bitch about working conditions.
• When inventing any product, the invention is always half the battle. Distribution is the other. The greatest product in the world goes unused if it isn’t leveraged into the proper distribution system--either one that exits, or one that you create.
• Human resource systems are the most expensive and complicated to run. Humans are unpredictable, expensive, and difficult to control.
• If you want to make millions of dollars, or billions, human resource systems are needed, because you can’t do everything yourself.
• Money is the king of money trees.
• Savers are winners because they eventually become lenders. Savers are winners because they become owners in companies. Savers are winners because they become producers and build assets.
• Every dollar saved is another freedom fighter in your army. If your money is fighting for you, your time is freed and you break the equation of “time for money”. Money is your army. The more you have, the more they will fight for freedom.
• Income is the key to growing your army of freedom fighters.
• Slowlaners (the middle-class) use compound interest to get wealthy while Fastlaners (the rich) use it to create income and liquidity. Slowlaners start with $5; Fastlaners start with $5 million.
• Thinking never made anyone rich, unless that thinking manifests itself into consistent action toward application of laws that work.
• The Law of Effection states that the more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become.
• Impact millions and make millions. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.
• The amount of money you have (or don’t have) is a direct reflection on the amount of value you have provided (or not provided).
• Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scan and magnitude creates billionaires.
• If your primary income source comes from a job, your ability to pay yourself first is paralyzed because the governments are paid first! For “pay yourself first” to be legitimate, you truly need to pay yourself first in infinite amounts and the government last. You must own your own vehicle.
• You can’t pay yourself first if you don’t own yourself. When you have a job, someone owns you.
• The first step in controlling your vehicle--you--is to own yourself so you can truly pay yourself first and the government last. That is accomplished by shelling your business into a corporation that you control.
• The best business structures are: C corporation, S corporation, and Limited Liability corporation.
• For small startups, I recommend either an LLC or an S corp. Stay away from partnerships and sole-proprietorships, as they do not limit liability.
• Poor choices are the leading cause of poorness.
• If you aren’t where you want to be, the problem is your choices.
• Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.
• Lifestyle choices will make you a millionaire.
• Your choices spark the fires of future circumstances.
• You are exactly where you decide to be.
• People don’t choose to be poor. They make poor decisions that slowly assemble into a poorness puzzle.
• Treasonous choices are actions that do irreparable harm to your life, your dreams, and your goals.
• No amount of money can keep you from prison or purge your soul from the foolish horror of taking someone’s life.
• Treasonous choices change your life forever.
• The smallest choices made in your daily life create habits and lifestyle that forms process--they are the ones that can make the biggest impact.
• A Fastlass process is hundreds of choices.
• We have two types of choices:
• Choices of perception (thought patterns)
• Choices of action (choosing to read)
• If you want extraordinary results, you’re going to need extraordinary thinking.
• Worst Case Consequence Analysis (WCCA) asks you to answer three questions about every decision of consequence:
• What is the worst-case consequence of this choice?
• What is the probability of this outcome?
• Is this an acceptable risk?
• The universe doesn’t care about your past.
• Extraordinary wealth will require you to have extraordinary beliefs.
• To be unlike “everyone” (who isn’t rich), you (who will be rich) require a strong defense; otherwise, their toxicity infects your mindset.
• Commiserating with habitual, negative, limited thinkers is treasonous.
• Take control and make choices that can alter the trajectory of your life.
• Value your time poorly and you will be poor.
• When life sucks, escapes are sought.
• Majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.
• There are two types of time that will make up your lifespan: Your free time and your indentured time.
• Money buys free time and eliminates indentured time.
• Parasitic debt is everything you owe the world. It is the excrement of Lifestyle Servitude.
• The leading cause of indentured time is parasitic debt.
• Control parasitic debt by controlling its source: instant gratification.
• Extreme inconvenience is never a match for saving money.
• Fastlaners are frugal with time, while Slowlaners are frugal with money.
• If you want to be rich, you have to start thinking rich. Time is king.
• What you know today is not enough to get you where you need to be tomorrow.
• In the Slowlane, education is used to elevate intrinsic value, while in the Fastlane it is used to facilitate and grow the business system.
• You learn from engagement, from doing, and from getting out and taking repeated action, more so than from any book or professor.
• You have the innate power to become an expert at anything not requiring physical talent. Anything!
• The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich.
• Take calculated risks. Do so and things happen.
• The act of doing does marvelous things.
• There is never a perfect time. Someday is today. Today is now. Today is all you’ve got. And if you wait, opportunity passes.
• Opportunity comes dressed as changes and challenges. Remember, change makes millionaires.
• Timing is rarely perfect. Waiting empower mediocrity.
• NECST is a Fastlane litmus test and validates your road. NECST: need, entry, control, scale, and time.
• Business that solve needs win. Business that provide value win. Business that solve problems win.
• Selfish, narcissistic motives do not make good, long-term business models.
• Never start a business just to make money. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs.
• Solve needs massively and money massively attracts. The amount of money in your life is merely a reflection to the amount of value you have given others.
• Beware of guru-speak: “Do what you love and the money will follow!” Bullshit.
• Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane action.
• The Fastlane isn’t a destination but a personal journey.
• Fastlaners work unlike everyone else so they can live unlike anyone else.
• The Commandment of Entry states that as entry barriers to any business road fall, or lessen, the effectiveness of that road declines while competition in that field subsequently strengths.
• Real business startups are processes, not events.
• If you want to live unlike everyone, you can’t be like everyone.
• You have to lead the pack and have “everyone” follow.
• If you can’t control every aspect of your company, you’re not driving!
• The driver retains control and makes the big money. At best, the hitchhiker makes good money.
• There is a difference between good money, big money, and legendary money. Good money is $20K/month. Big money is $200K/month. And then there is legendary money, where you earn more than a million dollars every month.
• To become a shark, you have to think like one. Sharks think big and guppies think small. As a shark, you have to drill down into your belief system and change your mindset. Think globally, not locally. Think lead, not follow. Think to innovate, not to copy. The change and transformation from guppy to shark starts with your thoughts as your focus moves from the few to the many.
• When you blindly invest your life and time into someone else’s brand, you become a part of their marketing plan.
• Not investing in my own brand was one of my most serious mistakes a s a young entrepreneur.
• If you don’t control your system, your money tree, and your brand, you control nothing. Stop climbing pyramids and start building them.
• Scale is about leverage and leverage is what gives the Fastlane wealth equation its power.
• To achieve scale, magnitude or reach must increase. Magnitude is naturally increase with price or cost. Reach is massive numbers. The more people you reach, the greater scale potential.
• The strongest barricade to Effection is scale. If you can’t serve millions, you won’t make millions.
• Effection always is biased toward the architect of the system.
• The Commandment of Time requires that your business detach from your time.
• Remember this: Owning a business doesn’t guarantee wealth or detachment from time.
• Starting a business is a big decision. Treat it with cursory interest, and your business resembles a hobby. And business that are run like hobbies pay like hobbies.
• 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.
• I call the most potent Fastlane roads the “Three Interstates”:
• internet
• innovation
• intentional iteration
• The internet is the shark of the Fastlane.
• The internet is the best fastlane available, because it immediately obeys the Five Commandments to the Fastlane, assuming a need-based premise. It naturally scales to a worldwide audience, it systematizes to automation via computer systems, it is a medium you can control, and its barriers are still strong enough to prevent “everyone” from entry.
• Internet business models (roads) fall into seven broad categories:
• subscription-based
• content-based
• lead generation
• social networks
• brokerage systems
• advertising
• e-commerce
• Innovation covers any act of creation followed by distribution. Let me repeat that: Innovation involves two acts: 1) Manufacture and 2) Distribution.
• The core activity of inventors is just taking something and improving or modifying it. Take something old and stale and make it better. Take an underexposed product, make it your own, and reintroduce it to the world. Take something unconventional and make it conventional.
• Innovation is a dual challenged process: manufacture and distribution. Inventing a product that solves a need is half the battle; the other half is getting your invention into the hands of millions, which involves a variety of distribution channels.
• Writing a book is not a business; selling the book is.
• You’ve got a great idea, but someone is already doing it? So what. Do it better. “Someone is doing it” is a monumental illusion imposing as an impassable obstacle. Someone is always already doing it. The bigger question is, can you do it better?
• Successful business rarely evolve from some legendary idea. Nope, successful entrepreneurs take existing concepts and make them better. They take poorly met needs and solve them better. SKip the big idea and go for the big execution.
• You don’t need an idea that has never been done before. Old ideas suffice; just take it and do it better! Execute like no one has!
• Poorly met needs are open roads when they often appear closed. Successful business take existing ideas, services, and products and simply make them better, or spin them in new directions.
• Opportunity is dressed in predictable code words that illuminate its presence.
• The opportunities of open roads come in easily painted language: discomfort, distress, inconvenience, complaints, problems, and performance gaps. You must attack these challenges and introduce solutions--offer solutions to the masses and I guarantee money will follow!
• Moral: Solve other people’s problems and you will solve your own money problems!
• Everyone fails on the road to success. What separates the winners from the losers is what happens when failure arises.
• Failures that drive you into new directions are often the most productive forces for invention.
• Life is not about money, it’s about time--so why are you throwing away 40 hours a week. Money doesn’t change people; it just makes them more of what they already are.
• The key to achieving enormous tasks is to break them down into their smallest parts.
• You can’t make $5K per month until you learn how to make $50 per month!
• You can’t build a financial empire if you’re ignorant of basic finance and economics.
• The first rule of financial literacy: “Live below your means.”
• Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.
• Slowlaners seek to minimize expenses while the Fastlaner seeks to maximize income and asset values.
• Hiring a financial adviser doesn’t fix financial literacy.
• Planned obsolescence is a marketer’s expectation that whatever they’re selling you, you won’t use it. And if you don’t use it, you are unlikely to ask for your money back.
• It is human nature to try to seek events and avoid process. The path of least resistance is not to do anything, or to try halfheartedly.
• Success is never about the idea but about the execution.
• “I had that idea!” Oh yeah? Who cares.
• Execution is the great divider separating winners and losers from their ideas.
• An idea is the event, while the execution is the process.
• The owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.
• When it comes to your ideas, your plans, and your business, you never know what works until you put it out to the world.
• Business plans are useless. Yes, I said it. Business plans are useless because they’re ideas jacked-up on steroids.
• The best business plan in the world will always be a track record of execution.
• The objective of customer service in any business should serve one function, similar to our men of the cloth, and that is to help, support, and resolve.
• Complaints are the world’s whispers hinting the direction you should be moving.
• When you change, there will be complaints. Guaranteed. And yes, not all of them are actionable simply because human psychology is in play, not the integrity of your work.
• Complaints of void are extremely valuable, as they expose unmet needs.
• Solve complaints that add the most value while helping the most.
• Where customer service lacks unearths great opportunity.
• 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.
• Word of mouth is a powerful advertising tool because it’s Free and reaps infinite return on investment (ROI).
• You customer service strategy will influence your company’s growth. Satisfaction implies expectations being met. To create raving customers, you must exceed satisfaction.
• Success in business comes from making your customer the boss and the No 1 stakeholder to your business.
• Look big, but act small.
• Have a good team of A’s--accountants and attorneys.
• Be very careful with whom you trust with the keys to your castle because they can drive you to financial ruin.
• There is only one person you can blindly trust in this world, and that is you.
• All the intangibles in the world can’t change a poor customer service experience.
• Your employees drive the public’s perception of your company.
• Nothing overcomes poor human experiences!
• Exploited weakness is where brands are built: Differentiation is a defense to commoditization.
• Analyze your competitor’s weaknesses.
• Force innovation.
• Marketing is a game of perceptions, and wherever the perception is, that’s the reality.
• Businesses survive. Brands thrive. A brand is the best defense to commoditization.
• The first step at building a brand is to have a Unique Selling Proposition or a USP.
• There are five steps to develop a USP:
• Uncover the benefits
• Be unique
• Be specific and give evidence
• Keep it short, clear, and concise
• Integrate your USP into ALL marketing materials
• Make it real
• There are five ways to get your message above the noise:
• polarize
• arouse emotions
• be risque
• encourage interaction
• be unconventional.
• Most consumer buying decisions are driven by emotions.
• If you can move your audience’s emotions and make them care, they will buy.
• A relationship sells more than an anonymous corporate entity.
• The first human behavior you can count on is selfishness. People want what they want. 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. People need to be told exactly what’s in it for them.
• It’s ironic: to succeed a Fastlane we must forsake selfishness yet satisfy the selfishness of others.
• As consumers, we buy things to solve needs. We engage in transactions to fill voids.
• If you want to sell anything, translate features to benefits. A four step process accomplishes this.
• Switch places
• Identify features
• Identify advantages
• Translate advantages into benefits
• Price is a brand-builder because price implies value. THe more expensive your price, the higher its perceived value. The cheaper your price, the cheaper its perceived value. Price isn’t simply a number that tells someone what something costs. It conveys value and worth.
• A scattered focus leads to scattered results.
• The richest people in the word got rich by focusing on one core purpose, not by diverting focus.
• Focus on one thing and do it in the most excellent way.
• Focus on one Fastlane business and kick ass at it.
• FASTLANE SUPERCHARGER
• Formula: Wealth is a formula and a systematic process of beliefs, choices, actions, and habits that form a lifestyle.
• Admit: Admit that the preordained path to wealth, “Get Rich Slow,” is fundamentally flawed because of Uncontrolled Limited Leverage, weak mathematics predicated on time.
• Stop and Swap: Stop following the wrong roadmaps. Stop doing what you’ve been doing.
• Time: Time is the king asset of the Fastlane--specifically, free time. Invest in activities that will grant free time. Avoid time thieves, such as parasitic debt that transfigures free time into indentured time. Make decision with time as a key decision factor.
• Leverage: Leverage controllable and unlimited mathematics to create wealth.
• Assets and Income: Wealth is accelerated by exploiting income and asset value via a business that can be systematized and eventually sold in a liquidation event. Exponential growth of income and asset value, not slashing expenses, creates millionaires.
• Number: Determine your number, break it down by the penny, and make it real today. Make your dream lifestyle real by posting photos of that lifestyle at your workspace.
• Effection: Grace effection and you shall be graced with wealth. Impact millions and you will make millions. Money reflects value.
• Steer: Life’s steering is choice. At some point, you must commit to the fastlane ideology, and that commitment forms your process. Become responsible, followed by accountable.
• Uncouple: 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.
• Passion & Purpose: 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 embroiled into process.
• Educate: Education begins at graduation. Pledge never to 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.
• Road: Train your mind to see problems. 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 a problem, a pain-point, or a service gap, and solve it. When you focus on needs, problems, inconveniences, and issues, roads open.
• Control: Engage in an organization that you fully control, from pricing to marketing to operations.
• Have: Have what others need and money will flow into your life. You can’t explode income by chasing money. Instead, focus on what attracts money, and that is a business that solves needs. Money comes from providing value.
• Automate: Get your time detached from your business.
• Replicate: To make millions, you must impact millions. TO impact millions, you must be on a field capable of affecting millions!
• Grow: Build a brand, not a business. Treat customers like your boss and reposition complaints to opportunities. Differentiate yourself from the competition.
• Exit: Have an exit strategy. Know when it's time to liquidate your assets, transforming paper money into real money.
• Retire, Reward, or Repeat: Reward yourself for milestones met everywhere along the journey.
• Excuses never made anyone rich, and we all have them. Stop being like everyone and start taking action. Make a choice today that can change the course of your life forever.
• Pay cash for everything. If you can’t pay cash, you can’t afford it.
• Risk is escalated when you get into business without a defined need, brand, or purpose. Risk is escalated when you get into business doing what you love verses doing what needs to be done. Risk is escalated when you bequeath control over major business functions to someone else.
• Change starts with your beliefs, because they dictate your future choices.
• Start making better choices, and your first choice should be an analysis of your past choices.
• “Get Rich Slow” demands a long life of gainful employment.
• “Get Rich Slow” is a losing game because it is codependent on Wall Street and anchored by your time.
• The real golden years of life are when you’re young, sentient, and vibrant.
• Fame or physical talent is not a prerequisite to wealth.
• Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.
• Change can happen in an instant.
• Wealth is a formulae, not an ingredient.
• Process makes millionaires. Events are 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 events.
• To force change, change must come from your beliefs, and your roadmap outlines those beliefs.
• Each roadmap is governed by a wealth equation and predisposed to a financial destination--sidewalk to poorness, slowlane to mediocrity, and the fastlane to wealth.
• A first-class ticket to the sidewalk is to have no financial plan.
• The sidewalk's natural gravitational pull is poorness, 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.
• Wealth is authored by strong familial relationships, fitness and health, and freedom--not be material possessions.
• Unaffordable material possessions are destructive to the wealth trinity.
• 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 by 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.
• 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” infomercial marketing is a Fastlane because savvy marketers know that sidewalkers place faith in events over process.
• Money making “systems” are rarely as profitable as the act of selling them to sidewalkers.
• Hitchhikers assign control over their financial plans to others, which effectively introduces probabilities to victim hood.
• 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.
• The slowlane is a natural course-correction from the Sidewalk evolving from taking 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, often requiring masterful political prowess in a corporate environment.
• 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.
• Slowland wealth is improbable due to Uncontrollable Limited Leverage (ULL).
• The first variable in the Slowlane wealth equation evolves from a job that factors to intrinsic value that equates to 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 the ore only 24 hours in the day, and the average lifespan is 74 years.
• 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.
• 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.
• Take advice from people with a prove, successful track record of their espoused discipline.
• Many money gurus often suffer from a Paradox of Practice; they teach on wealth equation while getting rich in another. They’re not rich from their own teachings.
• 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 it’s 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 be 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.
• $5 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.
• 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.”
• 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 business are jobs in disguise.
• The Fastlane wealth equation is not bound by time and its variables are unlimited and controllable.
• The key to the Fastlane wealth equation is to have a high speed limit, or an unlimited range of values for units sold. This create 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 acceleration 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 multiples 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.
• 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-resources systems.
• Real estate, licenses, and patents are examples of rental systems.
• Internet and software business 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.
• One saved dollar is the seed to a money tree.
• A mere 5% interest on $10 million dollars is $40K a month in passive income.
• A saved dollar is the best passive income instrument.
• Fastlaners (the rich) don’t use compounded interest or the markets to get wealthy but to create income and preserve liquidity.
• 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.
• 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 versus indirect access.
• To make millions you must serve millions in scale or a few in magnitude.
• “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.
• The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
• The steering wheel of your life is your choices.
• You are exactly where you choose 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.
• 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 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 acclerative 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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 landmines where the weak are removed from the road and sent back to the land of “most people”.
• Failure is natural to success. Expect is 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 dugout.
• 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.
• Not all businesses are the right road. Few roads move at, through, or near the Law of Effection.
• The best roads and the purest Fastlanes satisfy the Five Fastlane Commandments: need, entry, control, scale, and time.
• 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 business 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.
• 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.
• Business 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.”
• 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 always retains control and the hitchhiker is at the mercy of the driver.
• Hitchhikers are party 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 eh Commandments of Control and Entry, and sometimes, Need.
• Network marketeers are soldiers in a Fastlaner’s army.
• Network marketing is a powerful distribution system. As a Fastlaner, seek to own one, not join one.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 idea; they just took existing concepts and make 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.
• 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 advisor doesn’t solve financial illiteracy and literacy is insurance.
• Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.
• 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.
• 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 ad nauseam on paper.
• 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 and their satisfaction hold 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.
• 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.
• Commoditization occurs when you get into business based on a false premise--”I want to own a business” or “I know who 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.
• Marketing and branding is the most powerful tool in your Fastlane toolbox.
• Businesses survive. Brands thrive.
• Business have identity crises, brands don’t. Identity crises force business owners into price commoditization.
• Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) are the keys to your brand and differentiate your company from the rest.
• People have a natural disposition to be unique and unlike everyone else.
• To succeed in marketing, your messages have to break above the advertising clutter, or noise.
• 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.
• Consumers make buying decisions based on emotions before practicality.
• If you can arouse emotions in your audience, you will be more likely to convince them to buy.
• People have a natural disposition to talk about themselves. If you can incorporate interaction 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 features advantages, and extrapolate those advantages into a specific result.
• Price implicitly conveys value and worth.
• Don’t allow your own perception of price to direct your brand to mediocrity.
• 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 their business and were 100% committed to it.
• Successful business monogamy can lead to successful business polygamy.