The Millionaire Fastlane – Get rich quick

In The Millionaire Fastlane, 3 paths are presented that you can follow throughout your life when it comes to money.

There’s the sidewalk, which results in poverty.

Secondly, there’s the slowlane, generally seen by everyone as “the realistic way to get rich”, followed by the fastlane which can lead you to real wealth.

Today you’ll learn the main lessons of this book which is capable of challenging our entire belief system.

MJ DeMarco

MJ DeMarco is a millionaire, author and entrepreneur who, after college, decided not to climb the corporate ladder like his friends.

On the contrary, the entrepreneur wanted (and achieved) something great, even though he faced great obstacles.

As a young man, DeMarco (author of the book The Millionaire Fastlane) was eating ice cream in the living room next to his house when a Lamborghini pulled up next to him. 

Curious, the young man asked the car’s owner what he did for a living and the answer was surprising:

The driver of the luxurious Italian car was an inventor, not a celebrity or rich through inheritance.

In this way, the young man realized that he didn’t need to be good at sports, singing or acting, he could be an inventor and become very rich.

As a result, after graduating from business school at the age of 22, he saw all his friends getting jobs in large corporations, while he had other plans.

Later, the author realized that his friends were walking the slowlane, while he was walking the fastlane.

At the same time as working to make his business work, the young entrepreneur worked as a delivery man, a helper, a driver and more:

“I delivered newspapers at 3am in bad neighborhoods. I delivered pizza, flowers and worked as a day laborer for a commercial plumbing company in the slums of Chicago, I was a busboy in a roach-infested Chinese restaurant, a limo driver, a charity can collector and a wall painter.”

More about DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane

Until one day, while waiting in a limousine, driving for work, he came to a realization.

Because he couldn’t stand his situation any longer, he decided to think of a new city to live in.

He opted for sunny Phoenix, Arizona, moving in with US$900 to his name and renting a studio that, as well as being his home, served as his office.

Changing the environment was an interesting strategy because the people around him doubted his dreams and the weather conditions affected him.

After much thought, DeMarco decided to focus on the idea that had the greatest potential for him:

He created Limos.com, a website that allowed people to find limousine rentals in different cities across the United States.

Although it didn’t make much money at first, the site developed quickly, and in the meantime, the young man was paying his bills by offering web design services to other companies.

In the 2000s, the young entrepreneur’s efforts finally began to pay off, so companies started looking for him to buy his creation Limos.com.

The top offer was US$1.2 million. He had become a millionaire.

The Millionaire Fastlane – Do you think that some people become the richest in the world because they invest?

If your answer is yes, you’re wrong.

By analyzing the story of DeMarco and other great entrepreneurs, we understand why they became so rich.

Take Mark Zuckerberg, for example.

The entrepreneur reached his first million at the age of 22, and only 5 years later, he became a billionaire.

He is the youngest man ever to achieve this feat.

As well as being an entrepreneur, Zuckerberg is also a programmer.

Surely you know him as the owner of Facebook and it’s true!

Together with his roommates (Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes) at Harvard University, Zuckerberg created the social network that would become the largest on the planet.

Would you like to read another example before moving on to the concepts in The Millionaire Fastlane?

We could talk about Elon Musk, who rose to global prominence after creating various high-tech companies.

These include: SpaceX, Tesla, Hyperloop, Neuralink, Startlink, The Boring Company and, previously, Paypal. 

He also bought X, formerly Twitter, for US$44 billion.

Sidewalk

To understand whether you fall into this group, it’s essential that you answer the following questions:

• Do you believe that people are rich because they had rich parents, luck or more favorable circumstances than you?
• Do you use all your monthly salary and often even more than you should and could?
• Haven’t you learned much since graduating from high school or college?

If you said yes to any of the above questions, this is a warning sign that you are following the sidewalk described in the book The Millionaire Fastlane.

This group includes people who live from paycheck to paycheck.

In other words, they receive their monthly paycheck and, as if by magic, they have nothing left.

Here, it’s not exactly about the amount of money, as people usually say:

I use all my monthly salary because I earn so little, I can’t save in any area of my life!

But you have to understand that the more they earn, the more they spend.

So, instead of trying to use their creativity to multiply the money they receive today, they find endless ways to spend it on unnecessary items.

The situation worsens when the person insists on spending and doesn’t have the money to do so.

They then get into huge debts as a result of their lack of control over their finances.

The Millionaire Fastlane – You can’t cure bad money management by making more money

If you search for people who have won the lottery and lost everything, you’ll come across a plethora of stories.

This proves once again that it’s not about how much money you get, but what you do with it.

And this analogy doesn’t just apply to people who have received a huge fortune.

Living as if there were no tomorrow is dangerous because you fail to analyze the worst-case scenario.

If you insist on living that life, what will you do if something happens, you lose your job or the country’s economy changes?

A person who lives this way literally ends up on the sidewalk because they don’t have any kind of responsibility or financial intelligence.

How to get off the sidewalk

First, recognize that, up until now, you’ve been on the sidewalk described in The Millionaire Fastlane.

If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, don’t insist that you’re on a different path.

Insisting on stubbornness won’t help you develop financially.

Just like an alcohol problem, financial problems should be seen as an illness.

In other words, only by recognizing your need for a cure will you be cured.

Then you have to fight your way out of the situation. You must fight for healing!

To give you an answer to this, we can look again at the three questions we asked earlier.

The first is as follows:

Do you believe that people are rich because they had rich parents, luck or more favorable circumstances than you?

Indeed, many people are rich because their parents are rich and many have had better circumstances in their lives.

But this is not the only path to wealth, as the author of The Millionaire Fastlane points out.

If you feel resentment, envy and hatred when you think of rich people, you certainly won’t become one of them.

Indirectly, you send a message to your brain that money is a bad thing, and you won’t make the effort to have it.

To follow the right path and achieve wealth, you must change your mindset.

Change your mindset about money, about organizing your finances, about great entrepreneurs.

I believe that one of the best explanations of the word luck is as follows:

Luck is the result of many actions.

When you believe in this definition, you understand that improving your financial life is not something that depends on circumstances and external things, it’s actually about constancy.

Persisting even when everything goes wrong, analyzing the situation and learning from your mistakes.

That way, you’ll know that you’ve made your own luck, even if others around you think you’re just lucky.

Another interesting point about changing your mindset, based on the book The Millionaire Fastlane, is the following:

If you’re financing your US$90k Mercedes-Benz over six years because that’s all you can afford, you can’t afford it.

This is a quote from DeMarco throughout the book.

We’re taught to think that rich people are those who prove it on a daily basis through material goods.

But that’s not true.

Wealth is not in the car, but in the freedom of knowing that you can buy it.

Secondly, think again about the following question:

Do you use all your monthly salary and often even more than you should and could?

If so, it’s time to learn how to handle your money wisely.

Learn about budgeting, categorizing expenses, emergency funds, how to save money, etc.

As well as gaining this knowledge, another interesting thing is to think of money as vital energy.

This is not a teaching from The Millionaire Fastlane, but it is worth mentioning:

Checking that a certain product costs US$100 doesn’t allow you to see the real value of your money.

But what does that mean?

I want you to think of the value of the product as an hour’s work. 

It’s simple: if you’re paid US$10 an hour, that product costs you 10 hours of your life.

By thinking in this way, you’ll know how to use your money more wisely, because you’ll understand that spending your financial resources on nothing is the same as wasting your life.

Now let’s look at the third question:

Haven’t you learned much since graduating from high school or college?

Imagine that a person isolated himself from the world in the 2000s.

24 years later, they decide to move back to a city, but in just a few months, they decide to go back to their isolated life.

That’s because this person can’t understand how technology works. She’s never had a cell phone and doesn’t know how people in the city live such a fast-paced life.

They feel incapable, alone and even dumb.

But is their comparison with others fair?

How can this person compare themselves with people who were born into technology and have been in this universe for 24 years?

Bringing this example into our reality and based on the book The Millionaire Fastlane, we unfortunately have a habit of making inappropriate comparisons.

If you and I went to the same university, we might go in different directions.

Maybe you’re completely obsessed with learning more, so as well as studying the compulsory materials, you read the best books and follow the best professionals.

On the other hand, I’m not interested in the class and barely study the compulsory materials.

When I leave university, I don’t even want to touch a book in my field, but the first chance I get, I’ll compare myself to you and say that you had better opportunities.

Note that in all the questions, we offer a simple answer: you need to learn.

If you want to change your mindset about money and learn how to use your salary, you have to seek knowledge.

Whether it’s through videos, books, podcasts or articles like this one.

The Millionaire Fastlane (Slowlane) – get rich in a “realistic and responsible” way

Is achieving financial freedom at 65 worth it if it devours 40 years of my youthful, most precious time of my life?

This is exactly what DeMarco asks readers in the book, highlighting the major problem with this method:

Assuming we’re going to live a long time, plan to achieve financial freedom only when we’re old.

People say that this is the magic formula for getting rich in a realistic and responsible way, but at the end of a long period, you won’t become truly rich.

You’ll have financial independence and be able to support yourself for the rest of your life, but this isn’t the best way to achieve all your money dreams.

Let me explain:

The second path described in The Millionaire Fastlane, is the standard model that your parents, teachers and even some financial professionals, indicate is the best way to get rich.

Getting rich in 40 years

So you may know an older person who went to college, finished their degree and got a good job.

Over the course of her life, she invested 10% of her monthly income, with the hope that it would yield 5% a year.

After 40 long years, whew! Nothing has gone wrong and this person has achieved her long-awaited financial independence.

However, for me, it doesn’t seem like a good deal to live once and sell my life for decades to finally realize my financial dreams.

This strategy basically works by exploiting your most valuable asset: your life.

And in The Millionaire Fastlane, it says that if you want to earn more, you have to sacrifice even more of your time.

However, there are only 24 hours in a day, so you probably won’t be able to work all day to drastically increase your income and be able to retire earlier or save more money for a more peaceful retirement.

There are two alternatives here, and you can choose the best one for you:

Stay in the slow lane or go to the fast lane.

If you’ve seen all the disadvantages of showlane and don’t think any of them will affect you, that’s fine.

I’d like to open a parenthesis and add a tip that’s not in this book – after all, the author wants you to go fast lane.

But if you think it’s exciting to have a long-term plan and go on to have a completely relaxed professional life, that’s fine too!

I prefer my long-term plan

Some people don’t want to build a huge empire.

They don’t agree with the teachings of The Millionaire Fastlane and simply want to have a balanced financial life and would like to retire at the age that everyone else does.

If you fall into this group, we have just one tip that can guarantee you all that peace of mind in the future:

Watch out for inflation.

The problem with trying to build wealth by investing little each month is that the price of things goes up and the value of our money goes down.

So, if you have a retirement plan for 40 years from now in which you will have collected US$800,000, remember that this amount will not be worth the same 40 years from now.

Therefore, one of the best solutions would be to update your investments as the inflation rate rises.

If the rate has risen by 1% in recent months, you need to do the same thing with your monthly investments.

As a result, you protect yourself so that you can have a good retirement and not depend on anyone else when you get older.

If you don’t intend to retire in 40 years and would like to take a faster route, you should know about this:

The Millionaire Fastlane – Get rich quick

It’s common to hear the phrase above and think:

That’s probably a corporate pyramid scheme, indoctrinating people with illusions, courses and speakers who want to sell “magic formulas”.

In the book, the author explains that getting rich quickly doesn’t mean you’ll make $1,000,000 in just one year.

He also doesn’t say that you only need to work for a few months and retire in record time.

Compared to the traditional way, people retire after 40 years of work.

With fastlane, you can retire after 10 years of hard work, so that you can live off a passive income for the rest of your life.

Another interesting point is to understand that fast is not synonymous with easy.

You won’t get rich simply by copying other people’s ideas, you have to come up with your own.

The Millionaire Fastlane – Your idea is the biggest secret

The greater the value you generate in society and the greater the number of people you impact, the greater your fortune.

So the answer is simple. If you want to earn more, generate value in people’s lives.

Note that this is not related to time.

Did you notice that at the beginning of this content, when we talked about the planet’s leading billionaires, we used variations of the word “create”?

They had an idea, realized that this idea would generate value and became very rich by developing a solution.

Zuckerberg and his colleagues developed their project to connect students and Harvard.

They identified the problem (communication difficulties) and created the solution (Facebook).

It didn’t take 40 years to do this, they unlocked the secret in the book The Millionaire Fastlane.

Surely you grew up hearing that money doesn’t grow on trees, but when you look at it from a different perspective, that’s not true.

Many businesses function as if they were trees.

Therefore, the founders of the companies work hard in the beginning, so that they can then sustain themselves with little effort, bearing great fruit for several years.

This is the famous passive income.

How to create value

There are 5 categories of fast lane business:

Rental, computer and software, content, distribution and human resources.

The secret to creating value lies in first being a producer and then becoming a consumer.

Let’s talk about one of the categories mentioned in The Millionaire Fastlane: content.

The internet opens up space for people who would like to work in this area.

For example, the biggest YouTubers on the planet earn millions of dollars every year.

But when we consider the secret of being a producer first, we can say the following:

Shouldn’t a person who spends a lot of their time on YouTube create content?

YouTube is interesting because it doesn’t work according to the number of hours you work, but according to the value you continue to generate.

If your video is really relevant, you’ll earn hundreds of dollars every month.

The video may have been posted 5 years ago, but if it continues to generate value, it continues to generate money.

Navigating the fast lane is also interesting because there’s the possibility of doubling your business in a short space of time.

I can say that there are no limits when you follow the tips in The Millionaire Fastlane.

Or rather, the limits depend on your ability to find creative solutions and provide value to the world.

But, it might just pop into your mind:

“Most people can’t create a successful business, that secret isn’t valid”

Drug abuse is a major problem in many parts of the world, with 5.8% of the world’s population using illegal drugs.

Young people, adults and older people destroy their health by taking drugs on a daily basis.

Think about the people around you who have this and other terrible habits.

Some of them don’t worry about the future, using all their strength to enjoy the now.

Here’s the problem: those who don’t strive for daily transformation and value good habits will hardly generate value in the world.

Those who use drugs and entertainment to escape their own reality will always be concerned with consuming, not producing.

If you find yourself in this kind of situation, start little by little.

Set yourself a small goal of reading at least The Millionaire Fastlane.

Next year, I read 3 books, and the following year, read 12.

Keep in mind that habits are built with patience and start investing in yourself tirelessly.

That way, you’ll strive to transform yourself on a daily basis and then try to transform the world around you.

CENTS

Finally, let’s talk about why in the book the author defines 5 categories of fast lane business.

They all relate to CENTS, which means:

Control, Entry, Need, Time and Scale.

By following the fast lane path, you control everything related to your business, be it price, type of product or operational choices.

In this sense, you stop investing your whole life working for other people’s dreams.

Take control!

Secondly, entry to The Millionaire Fastlane is about identifying bad opportunities and crowded markets that should be avoided.

It also gives you an idea of where the real opportunities lie.

On the other hand, it’s worth talking about “needs”.

This is probably one of the main points, given that what will make you rich is chasing needs, not chasing money.

Let me explain:

Whatever market you decide to enter, your business exists to solve people’s problems. 

Only by solving problems will you make a lot of money.

And you can do this in many ways, whether it’s making people feel better, educating them, making them look good, offering security, increasing positive emotions, satisfying appetites or making things simpler.

A company that is able to bring hope to its customers’ dreams is also very successful.

Fourthly, the book The Millionaire Fastlane shows us that we must consider time.

You don’t have to be married to your business for it to work, but if you’re the only one capable of running it, that’s a problem.

Finally, bear in mind that the more you can scale it, the richer you get.

Conclusion

By generating value in the world and getting good results from it, you’ll see that life can be much better than you imagined.

This path is not for everyone. Is it for you?

Daniel 2 de May de 2024