THE MILLIONAIRE FASTLANE by MJ DeMarco

• If you want to keep getting what you’re getting, keep doing what you’re doing.
• Success is a journey, and it can’t be outsourced to the Philippines in a four-hour work week.
• The message of “Get Rich Slow” is clear: Sacrifice your today, your dreams, and your life for a plan that pays dividends after most of your life has evaporated.
• The Slowlane prognosticators know something that they aren’t telling you: What they teach doesn’t work, but selling it does.
• “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.
• Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.
• All self-made multimillionaires create their wealth by a carefully orchestrated process.
• Wealth eludes most people because they are preoccupied with events while disregarding process. Without process, there is no event.
• Speed is execution and your ability to go from idea to implementation.
• Process makes millionaires. Events are by-products of process.
• If you want to change your life, change your choices.
• Beliefs preceded choices, which precede action.
• Beliefs are powerful mechanisms that drive action, whether true or not.
• To force change, change must come from your beliefs, and your roadmap outlines those beliefs.
• You can’t medicate poor money management with more money.
• more money is not a solution to poor financial management.
• You cannot solve poor financial management with more money.
• If you don’t have health, you lack wealth.
• Some want to look rich, while others want to be rich.
• “Faux wealth” is the illusion of wealth without having it.
• Unaffordable material possessions are destructive to the wealth trinity.
• Debt and Lifestyle Servitude keeps people bound to work and unbound to relationships.
• You’re conditioned to accept normal based on society’s already corrupted definition of wealth, and because of it, normal itself is corrupted. Normal is modern-day slavery.
• Affordability is when you don’t have to think about it. If you have to think about “affordability,” you can’t afford it because affordability carries conditions and consequences.
• This self-talk is a warning that you can’t afford it.
• Instead of you owning your stuff, your stuff owns you.
• 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.
• If you think you can afford it, you can’t.
• The consequence of instant gratification is the destruction of freedom, health, and choice.
• Process creates events that others see as luck.
• Like wealth, luck is not an event but an aftereffect of process. Luck is the residue of process.
• To realize luck, engage in processes where better probabilities exist.
• Like wealth, luck is created by process, not by event.
• Luck is created by increased probabilities that are improved with the process of action.
• Moneymaking “systems” are rarely as profitable as the act of selling them to Sidewalkers.
• The Law of Victims says you can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.
• Stop being a victim by taking responsibility, followed by accountability.
• Immunization for victimitis occurs when you are both responsible for AND accountable to your actions and the possible poor consequences of those actions.
• We’re being methodically brainwashed to believe that we deserve everything without obedience to process, or accountability.
• The Law of Victims: You can’t be a victim if you don’t relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.
• Taking responsibility is the first step to taking the driver’s seat of your life. Accountability is the final.
• The driving force behind wealth under Get Rich Slow is time—time employed at the job and time invested in the markets.
• Wealth is best lived young and enjoyed while you have health, vibrancy, energy, and yes, maybe even some hair. Wealth is best lived in the prime of your life, not in its twilight after 40 years of 50-hour workweeks have pulverized your dreams into surrender.
• When you trade your life mindlessly for a paycheck, you risk being blinded to life itself as you cursively walk by it in a busy train station. Life does not begin on Friday night and end Monday morning.
• The ultimate insanity is to sell your soul Monday through Friday for the paycheck of Saturday and Sunday.
• Five days of servitude for two days of freedom is not a good trade unless you trade time into a system that can give you a better return on your time.
• The problem is, we’ve been brainwashed to accept the Slowlane roadmap as normal.
• Wealth is best experienced when you’re young, vibrant, and able, not in the twilight of your life.
• The predisposed destination of the Slowlane is mediocrity. Life isn’t great, but it isn’t so bad either.
• If you want to escape the Slowlane, find wealth and freedom fast, you’ve got to dump the job.
• Jobs suck because they’re rooted in limited leverage and limited control.
• 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.
• 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 marketplace 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.
• 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.
• To accumulate financial wealth, you need to attract large sums of money. To attract large sums of money, you need two things: 1) Control and 2) Leverage.
• 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.
• Anything that steals time and doesn’t have the power to free time is a liability.
• Slowlane wealth is improbable due to Uncontrollable Limited Leverage (ULL).
• Wealth cannot be accelerated when pegged to mathematics based on time.
• If you don’t control the variables inherent in your wealth universe, you don’t control your financial plan.
• The problem with formal education used to raise intrinsic value is that it’s ungodly expensive in time and money.
• Not all education is created equal.
• If an education entombs you under a mountain of debt and shackles you to a job for the rest of your life, is it really a good education?
• If you financed your advanced education with debt, the debt automatically becomes parasitic and traps you into forced job servitude, and that destroys freedom.
• Slowlaners attempt to manipulate intrinsic value by education.
• Parasitic debt is debt that creates indentured time and forces work.
• The Paradox of Practice asks, “Do you practice what you preach? Are you a model, an exemplification of what you teach?”
• A Paradox of Practice exists when someone promotes a moneymaking strategy but that strategy is not what made him or her rich.
• Sadly, it’s virtually impossible to get good, practical money advice, because most gurus live a Paradox of Practice.
• Economic recessions expose the Slowlane as a risky fraud with lifetime ramifications.
• 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.
• The Slowlane is predisposed to mediocrity because the numbers are always mediocre.
• Extreme talent is paid extremely well.
• A millionaire is not rich. Five million is the old one million.
• 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.
• $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 Fastlane is a business and lifestyle strategy characterized by Controllable Unlimited Leverage (CUL), hence creating an optimal environment for rapid wealth creation and extraordinary lifestyles.
• The Fastlane is about creating large sums of wealth rapidly and beyond the confines of “middle class.”
• The moment you stop learning is the moment you stop growing.
• 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.
• 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.”
• Losing teams use losing playbooks.
• To win, switch teams and use the winner’s playbook.
• 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.
• Producers get rich. Consumers get poor.
• 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 world value.
• 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.
• If you can control the variables inherent to your wealth equation, you can get wealthy.
• To weaponize the Fastlane wealth equation, you must engage in a Fastlane business that has the potential for leverage or high speed limits.
• Asset value is simply the worth of any property you own that has marketplace value.
• 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.
• When your wealth is predicated on factors that you cannot control and that are implicitly limited, you aren’t going to make fast progress.
• Money grows on trees if you own a money tree. And, you can own one if you know how and where to get the seeds. Money trees are business systems that survive on their own.
• There are five business seedlings to money trees.
• Rental Systems Computer/Software Systems Content Systems Distribution Systems Human Resource Systems
• Real estate is one “rental system.” I consider real estate money trees as Fastlane 1.0 or Wealth 1.0. It is the old way and still very much a road to wealth.
• Appreciative assets (asset value) are cornerstones in the Fastlane wealth equation.
• Rental systems are powerful money trees because they are high on the passivity scale and survive time.
• 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.
• Software millionaires can be “average Joes.”
• Software, when tapped into potent distribution, can be replicated to millions. It scales without significant degradation to passivity.
• When inventing any product, the invention is always half the battle. Distribution is the other.
• Human resource systems are the most expensive and complicated to run. Humans are unpredictable, expensive, and difficult to control.
• 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.
• Savers are winners because they eventually become lenders.
• 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.”
• Fastlaners think globally, not locally.
• Compound interest pays my bills. It’s my tool. It’s my passive income source. Yet, compound interest is not responsible for my wealth. This is critical. Fastlaners aren’t using compound interest to build wealth, because it’s not in their wealth equation. The heavy lifting of wealth creation is left to their Fastlane business.
• Fastlaners understand this weakness and realize that the compound interest weapon is most effective with large sums of money. For compound interest to be effective, you must bypass 30 years of mathematical ineptitude by riding the crest where it is effective.
• 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 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.
• Thinking never made anyone rich, unless that thinking manifests itself into consistent action toward application of laws that work.
• Events of wealth sell. Process does not.
• 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. The shortened, sanitized version is simply: Affect millions and make millions.
• Impact millions and make millions. It doesn’t get any simpler than that!
• Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires.
• Make a giant impact a few times or make a small impact millions of times.
• 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.
• If your primary income source comes from a job, your ability to pay yourself first is paralyzed because the governments are paid first!
• The best business structures for your Fastlane business are: C corporation S corporation Limited liability corporation
• For small startups, I recommend either an LLC or an S corp.
• “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.
• Poor choices are the leading cause of poorness.
• If you aren’t where you want to be, the problem is your choices. Your circumstances are the symptoms of those choices.
• Lifestyle choices will make you a millionaire.
• Your choices spark the fires of future circumstances.
• 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.
• 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.
• Choices of perception serve as the impetus to choices of action.
• The first step in making better choices starts with your choice of perception, because your actions evolve from those perceptions.
• Good choices of perception translate into good choices of action. To change your perception is to change your future actions.
• Changing your life starts with changing choices.
• 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 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.
• If you want to push beyond average results produced by average people, you’ll need to adopt an uncommon approach that doesn’t fall in the favor of “everyone.”
• 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.
• Time is the greatest asset you own, not money,
• The reality is that time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.
• Money buys free time and eliminates indentured time.
• Parasitic debt is everything you owe the world.
• The average American owes more than they are worth.
• Fastlaners are frugal with time, while Slowlaners are frugal with money.
• If you want to be rich, you have to start thinking rich.
• 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.
• When you continually inject yourself with new education, new skills, and new competencies, new roads open and things run smoothly.
• The purpose of education within the Fastlane is to amplify the power of the money tree and the business system. You’re not a cog in the wheel; you learn to build the wheel.
• The greatest travesty of the free world is the under use of knowledge.
• Quit playing Gameboy grab-ass and hit the books.
• You have the innate power to become an expert at anything not requiring physical talent.
• The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich.
• Books possess the greatest return for your educational dollar. Buy them, borrow them, or steal them. Just read them.
• 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.”
• Winners are forged at the Redline. What’s the Redline? The Redline is pure, unadulterated commitment.
• Money trees, businesses, and systems aren’t built overnight.
• There’s a profound difference between interest and commitment.
• You can have mediocre comfort now or meteoric comfort later. The Fastlaner trades short-term comforts with the foreknowledge that long-term extraordinary comfort is to be gained.
• Fear of failure is attributed to an overestimated worst-case consequence analysis.
• Minimize moronic risk and take advantage of intelligent risk.
• Timing is rarely perfect. Waiting empowers mediocrity.
• 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.
• If you’re a Slowlaner, your road is your job: doctor, lawyer, engineer, salesman, hairdresser, pilot. If you’re a Fastlaner, your road is a business: Internet entrepreneur, real estate investor, author, or inventor.
• The Law of Effection says to make millions you must impact millions.
• To make millions, you must serve millions.
• 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.
• Businesses that solve needs win. Businesses that provide value win. Businesses that solve problems win profits.
• Never start a business just to make money. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs.
• Give first, take second.
• Money chasers are consumers who haven’t quite made the transition to producer. They want to be producers, but they selfishly think like consumers.
• Want to make big bucks? Then start attracting money instead of chasing it.
• Money isn’t attracted to selfish people. It is attracted to businesses that solve problems. It’s attracted to people who fill needs and add value. 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 to others.
• Make a freaking impact and start providing value!
• Unfortunately, if you LOVE doing it, bet on thousands of others loving it too.
• The motivational fuel for the Fastlane is passion, not love.
• I repeat: Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane action.
• Fastlaners work unlike everyone else so they can live unlike anyone else.
• 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.
• 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 strengthens.
• 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.”
• business hitchhiker seeks refuge from risk and cowers within the confines of a matriarchal organization.
• When you blindly invest your life and time into someone else’s brand, you become a part of their marketing plan.
• If you don’t control your system, your money tree, and your brand, you control nothing.
• Stop climbing pyramids and start building them.
• 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 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.
• Scale is about leverage and leverage is what gives the Fastlane wealth equation its power.
• Without leverage, you can’t create wealth exponentially.
• To achieve scale, magnitude or reach must increase. Magnitude is naturally increased with price or cost.
• Reach, exclusive of magnitude, also achieves scale. Reach is massive numbers. The more people you reach, the greater scale potential.
• To make millions, you must affect millions.
• There are three barricades that prevent entrepreneurs from realizing the Law of Effection: Scale, Magnitude, and Source.
• The strongest barricade to Effection is scale. If you can’t serve millions, you won’t make millions.
• The other barricade to Effection is Magnitude.
• If you can’t be the source, serve the source.
• 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.
• The Commandment of Time requires that your business detach from your time.
• Jobs are time trades for income, and yes, so are some businesses. The goal of the Fastlane is a disconnection of your time from income, even if that income isn’t millions.
• A business attached to your time is a job.
• 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.
• Starting a business is a big decision. Treat it with cursory interest, and your business resembles a hobby. And businesses 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.
• The three Interstates are: Internet Innovation Intentional Iteration
• The most potent interstate is an Internet business.
• The Internet is the best Fastlane available, because it immediately obeys the Five Commandments to the Fastlane, assuming a need-based premise.
• Brokers bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions.
• Innovation covers any act of creation followed by distribution. Let me repeat that: Innovation involves two acts: 1) Manufacture and 2) Distribution.
• What is the product of innovation? Virtually anything that solves a need or fulfills a desire.
• Inventing is still recognized as the default get-rich-quick method out there, and yes, it is alive and well. However, don’t be fooled. Inventing isn’t really about inventing the vehicle, the telephone, or the goofy Segway—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.
• 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:
• Distribution is where the war is won. A great product is worthless if it doesn’t get into the hands of people, and that requires distribution.
• Writing a book is not a business; selling the book is.
• 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.
• Opportunity is a solution to an inconvenience. Opportunity is simplification. Opportunity is a feeling. Opportunity is comfort. Opportunity is better service. Opportunity is fixing pain. Opportunity is putting weak companies out of business.
• Competition is a staple of business.
• Successful businesses 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!
• Successful businesses 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.
• 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.
• Freedom has a price, and that price is money.
• No matter how big or small, dreams have a price, and that price is money, responsibility, accountability, and commitment.
• Your destination is the lifestyle you desire while having the freedom to enjoy it. There are two strategies to hit your destination. The first is a money system in which you amass a lump sum large enough to earn monthly interest that will support your lifestyle needs. The second is a business system that spawns passive cash flow that supports your lifestyle AND simultaneously funds your money system.
• If your business system generates passive income, you can use it to fund your lifestyle and your money system simultaneously.
• Get started today by looking three feet in front of you, not three miles.
• The key to achieving enormous tasks is to break them down into their smallest parts.
• You can’t make $5,000 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. These disciplines are the building blocks to a financial empire, and without them the Sidewalk becomes a danger.
• Remember, more money doesn’t solve money problems.
• The first rule of financial literacy: “Live below your means.”
• Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.
• “Live below your means” is relevant at any income level.
• Remember, Slowlaners seek to minimize expenses while the Fastlaner seeks to maximize income and asset values.
• If you can’t critique good advice from bad you don’t have control.
• Financial advisers do not solve financial illiteracy just as more money doesn’t solve poor money management.
• 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.
• 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.
• Get-rich systems sold on TV take advantage of human nature because it is human nature to seek events and avoid process.
• Execution is getting that idea out of your mind on onto the roads of possibility.
• Entrepreneurs struggle to differentiate between idea and execution. They think ideas are worth millions, when success is never about the idea but about the execution.
• An idea is the event, while the execution is the process.
• Execution is the great divider separating winners and losers from their ideas.
• The owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.
• According to entrepreneur Derek Sivers (Sivers.org) ideas are just multipliers while execution represents actual money.
• Execution takes process: effort, sacrifice, discipline, and persistence. Ideas are just events.
• 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.
• When it comes to your ideas, your plans, and your business, you NEVER know what works until you put it out to the world.
• The ultimate judge-and-jury of ideas is the world and the marketplaces that serve them.
• the world tells you which direction you should be going at all times.
• The world doesn’t care about ideas; it only reacts to them.
• Business plans are useless.
• Business plans are useless because they’re ideas jacked-up on steroids.
• Business plans are useless until they are married to execution.
• The moment you execute, the world will tell you just what I told you: Your business plan is useless.
• The best business plan in the world will always be a track record of execution.
• 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 the world’s whispers hinting the direction you should be moving.
• Complaints of void are when your customer continually requests something and you simply don’t have it. Complaints of void are extremely valuable, as they expose unmet needs.
• Complaints of void are goldmines of opportunity. People freely tell you exactly what they want and you don’t have to pay for it! Unmet needs are served up on a silver platter.
• Satisfaction implies expectations being met. To create raving customers, you must exceed satisfaction.
• Great customer service costs more to provide, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.
• Anywhere customer service is expected to suck, you have a business opportunity.
• 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 partner is like being married. It either works fabulously or it ends in fiery divorce.
• When you blindly trust others to anything—business, financial investments, security—you’re vulnerable to being conned.
• You must make your trust an asset to be earned by others. Let actions speak louder than words. When you allow words to disarm your trust or BS meter, you become vulnerable to attack.
• There is only one person you can blindly trust in this world, and that is YOU.
• Providing great customer service is one thing; getting employees to deliver it is another.
• 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.
• “Me-too” businesses make “me-too” incomes.
• Forget about your competition 95% of the time. The other 5% should be used to exploit their weaknesses and differentiate your business.
• 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.
• Marketing can convince people to buy mediocre products.
• Marketing is a game of perceptions, and whatever the perception is, that’s the reality.
• Businesses survive. Brands thrive. A brand is the best defense to commoditization.
• 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.
• Your USP is the anchor to your brand.
• The objective of a USP is to be unique when compared to the alternatives.
• The best USPs are short, clear, and powerful. Long phrases get skipped over.
• A USP is worthless if it isn’t conveyed throughout every aspect of your business.
• You must deliver on what you say.
• Polarization works because it involves an extreme viewpoint, which forces people to either love or hate you.
• Most consumer buying decisions are driven by emotions.
• If you can move your audience’s emotions and make them care, they will buy.
• 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. Therefore, our marketing messages must focus on benefits, not features. People need to be told exactly what’s in it for them.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 tool in your Fastlane toolbox.
• Businesses survive. Brands thrive.
• Businesses 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 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 direct your brand to mediocrity.
• A scattered focus leads to scattered results.
• When you segregate your effort among assets, you build weak assets.
• To hit the top of your game, business or otherwise, you have to eat, live, and shit your thing. If you’re dabbling in 10 different things, your results will be dabbling and unimpressive. Focus on one thing and do it in the most excellent way.
• 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.
• The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
• 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.
• Invest in activities that will grant free time.
• Make decisions with time as a key decision factor.
• Wealth is accelerated by exploding income and Asset value via a business that can be systemized and eventually sold in a liquidation event.
• Exponential growth of income and asset value, not slashing expenses, creates millionaires.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Automate your business and honor the Commandment of Time. Get your time detached from your business.
• To make millions, you must impact millions. To impact millions, you must be on a field capable of affecting millions!
• Excuses never made anyone rich, and we all have them. Stop being like everyone and start taking action.