Millionaire Fastlane
The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Most people follow path of gaining a degree, getting a job, saving money each month, in the hope you can retire in your 60s and be wealthy.
The book presents an alternative - the Fastlane approach - get rich quickly but be prepared for it to be hard.
Through creating a business with full control and leverage, it’s possible to build wealth quickly.
🎨 Impressions
I had high expectations given how highly it was recommended by Ali Abdaal. The book was jam-packed with practical nuggets, steps and advice to build wealth quickly. The argument for the Fastlane approach was compelling, and well laid-out.
How I Discovered It
Recommended by Ali Abdaal multiple times, along with a couple of friends who enjoyed it.
Who Should Read It?
If you want to understand what true wealth is, what might be holding you back and how to create it quickly. If you are serious about changing course in your life from what you’re currently doing to create wealth and want the blueprint.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
You want to be damn sure you aren’t ‘other people’ because ‘other people’ is synonymous with most people. Most people are consumers who are two pay-checks away from being broke.
Time isn’t a commodity, something you pass around like a cake. Time is the substance of life. When anyone asks you to give your time, they’re really asking for a chunk of your life.
📒 Summary + Notes
INTRODUCTION
If you aren’t wealthy, stop what you’re doing. You have to unlearn what you have learned.
Success is a JOURNEY, it can’t be outsourced to the Philippines in a four-hour work-week. The Millionaire Fastlane like a yellow brick road paved in psychology and mathematics that puts the odds of massive wealth in your favour.
The importance of PROCESS. All events of wealth are preceded by a process, a backstory of trial, risk, hard work and sacrifice. If you try to skip the process, you’ll never experience the events. Process makes millionaires. Events are a residual by-product of process. Process cannot be outsourced, because process dawns wisdom, personal growth, strength and ultimately, events. Luck is a product of process. Actions, work and being ‘out there’ stand you in the chance of being at the right place at the right time. Luck is not an event, but the residue of process.
Own your mistakes, failures and triumphs. Reflect on your CHOICES. Are you in a situation because you put yourself there. Did you error in the process? Were you lazy? Most bad situations are consequences of bad choices. Own them and own your life. You are in the drivers seat and when you own your decisions, failure doesn’t become the badge of victimhood - it becomes wisdom. When you’re accountable to your choices, you alter your behaviour in the future and take the drivers seat in your life.
THE SIDEWALK
The sidewalk is living for today rather than the future. It’s what most people follow, constantly consuming and spending.
THE SLOWLANE
The Slowlane sacrifices today for a brighter tomorrow. This means reading personal finance books, saving 10% of our paychecks, investing in various funds, receiving compound interest, etc. Most of our society including (parents, teachers and finance gurus) tell us this is the smart way to go.
But the Slowlane takes decades, isn’t guaranteed, and the people who preach this method don’t practice it.
Following this path, you trade 5 days in the week for 2 days at the weekend is a poor return on your time. The 5-2 return on investment is negative 60%. You sell your freedom to get freedom.
Your value is dictated, diminished and delimited. Therefore the job becomes a delimiter on what’s important: wealth, freedom and self-growth. The Slowlane offers no control or leverage. Time has no leverage - your time is limited to 24 hours of exchange. Can you control your employer? Your salary?
Wealth creation via compound interest requires the passing of time. Index funds can’t be leveraged or controlled. Wealth is built with time as an asset, not as a liability.
People who are proclaiming how to get rich are selling you the Slowlane while they get rich in the Fastlane. The rich uses markets for income and wealth preservation - not to create it.
THE FASTLANE
The Fastlane is about starting a business, retiring while you can enjoy it, and doing so relatively quickly (under 10 years).
It focuses on:
1) Controllable Unlimited Leverage - maximum control and leverage
2) Business - your own business, self-employment and entrepreneurship are key
3) Lifestyle - commitment of blended beliefs, processes and actions
4) Rapid Wealth Creation - creating large sums of wealth rapidly beyond the confines of the ‘middle class’
Change creates millionaires. Those who see changes and take advantage of it will become the new millionaires and billionaires. Because change is constantly, millionaire opportunities also remain constant.
THE LAW OF EFFECTION: Impact millions and make millions. How many lives have you touched? Who has benefited from your work, your assets, your handiwork? What problems have you solved? What value are you to society? The more lives you impact, directly or indirectly, the more wealth you will attract. Think big to earn big.
Scale and magnitude creates millionaires.
YOU AND YOUR VEHICLE TO WEALTH
Update Your Choices and Beliefs
The first step to controlling your vehicle is to own yourself - so you’re paid first and the government last. Form a business into a corporation that you control.
The Fastlane isn’t something you try, it’s something you live. It isn’t one choice but hundreds. When you string choices together, they create your process and your process will create your lifestyle. Lifestyle choices will make you a millionaire. Your choices spark the fires of future circumstances.
The younger you are, the more potent your choices and the more horsepower you possess. Over time, horsepower erodes as the consequences of old choices are thick and hard to bend.
Your choice of action manifest from your choice 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 a reality.
The more uncanny and exceptional you strive to be, the more you need to fight through social indoctrination. Extraordinary wealth will require you to have extraordinary beliefs.
If your environment is giving you resistance, then you must take proactive steps to remove them, they are blocking your dreams. Take control and make choices that can shift the trajectory of your life.
Massively Value Your Time
Value your time poorly and you will be poor. Fastlaners understand that time is the gas tank of life. Fastlaners exalt time as their primary consideration in decision making because it’s our most valued asset. Fastlaners are frugal with time, while Slowlaners are frugal with money. Time is king.
Constantly Build On Your Knowledge & Skills
What you know today is not enough to get where you need to be tomorrow. You must constantly re-invent yourself and the reinvention is education. Education is critical - you need to continually inject yourself with new knowledge, new skills and new competencies. New roads open and things will run smoothly.
In today’s information society, there is no excuse not to find something out. Education is free for your consumption. The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich. The best investment you can make is in yourself. So be willing to pay for your education now, or pay a much bigger price for your education later.
Be Prepared to Commit and Experience Short-Term Pain
Money trees, businesses and systems aren’t built overnight. Commitment is money tree water, sun, fertilise and cultivation.
The Fastlaners trade short term comfort with foreknowledge that long-term extraordinary comfort is to be gained. The brick walls are not there to keep us out, but to show us how badly we want something.
Fastlane success requires an investment toll of time and effort. This toll makes you special and keeps everyone else out.
Failure is Necessary
The sweat of success is failure. Failure is simply a natural response to success. If you avoid failure, you will also avoid success. You have to take risks. Get uncomfortable and fail into progress.
Start Your Journey Now
Someday is dangerous and paralysing. Make someday today. There is never a perfect time.
FASTLANE FIVE COMMANDMENTS
1) Control
Fastlaners retain control. Think globally, not locally. Think to lead, not to follow. Think to innovate, not copy. Focus moves from the few to the many.
You must control the product and the policy. Take on the producer’s role. Stop climbing pyramids and start building them.
2) Entry
The commandment of entry states that as entry barriers fall, competition rises and the road weakens.
Easy access roads carry more traffic, leading to higher competition, creating lower margins. Exceptionalism is required to overcome weak entry barriers.
Any business that takes 10 minutes to do/join/participate violates entry. Violate entry and you could be like everyone else. If everyone is doing it, you shouldn’t do it. When it comes to money, the best warning flag is ‘everyone.’
3) Need
Businesses that solve needs and provide value win. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs. Chase problems, pain points, service deficiencies and emotions. Give first, take second.
Solve needs massively and money massively attracts. The amount of money in your life is a reflection to the amount of value you have given to others. Focus on:
Make them feel better (entertainment, music, video games)
Help them solve a problem
Educate them
Make them look better
Give them security
Raise a positive emotion
Satisfy appetites
Make things easier
Enhance their dreams and give them hope
4) Time
Your business and income need to detach from time.
5) Scale
Scale is about leverage and leverage is what gives the Fastlane wealth equation its power.
Be in the business of home-runs. To achieve scale, magnitude or reach must increase. Magnitude is naturally increased with price or cost. Reach is massive numbers. Ask yourself:
Can the net income of this business scale from $2,000 a month to $200,000
Can the asset value of this business scale to millions
Can this business impact millions
Can this business be replicated or expanded
ADDITIONAL FACTORS
Look for OPPORTUNITY. Opportunity is a solution to an inconvenience, simplification, a feeling, a comfort, a better service. If someone is already doing your idea, do it better. Someone is always already doing it. Opportunities comes from discomfort, distress, inconvenience, complaints, problems and performance gaps.
Gain FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE. To successfully leverage a money system, you have to familiarise yourself with financial instruments that fuel the money system. Gain financial knowledge.
Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.
THE ACCELERATOR - TAKING ACTION
Most people will do nothing with this information. Speed is turning off the Playstation. Speed is uncovering a need and formulating a solution. Speed is about making contacts and forcing your process out into the world.
Potential speed = An idea
Actual speed = an idea accelerated and executed
An idea is the event, execution is the process. Execution takes process: effort, sacrifice, discipline and persistence. Speed is the transformation of ideas to execution.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1) Be a producer not a consumer
2) Impact millions to make millions
3) Focus on the value you’re providing
4) Getting wealthy is a process - prioritise the process
5) Work out a way to detach your time from your income
6) Wealth is a Formula and a systematic process of beliefs, choices, actions, and habits that form a lifestyle
7) Time is your most important asset
8) You need to commit and take control
9) Never stop learning
10) Leverage as much as you can to scale, replicate and grow
