I like reading books about money, growth mindset, and habit. This book includes the entire three subjects I am interested in. In every book I read, I am hoping to get new insight or knowledge from the writer. I think the writer writes about 80% of the book talk about the slow lane, and how slow they building their wealth. It could have been done in a shorter way, but the slow lane discussion is stretched so much that it looks repetitive. If you want to read the part where he finally talks about how to be a millionaire, you can go straight to chapter 29. The writer divided the roadmap to wealth into 3 categories:
1. The Sidewalk
2. The Slow lane
3. The Fast Lane
Each roadmap contains key mindsets that act as signposts, or “mind posts,” that provide direction and guide actions, just like a roadmap. Those mind posts are:
Debt Perception: Does debt control you or do you control your debt?
Time Perception: How is your time valued and treated? Abundant? Fleeting? Inconsequential?
Education Perception: What role does education have in your life?
Money Perception: What is money’s role in your life? Is money a tool or a toy? Plentiful or scarce?
Primary Income Source: What are your primary means of creating income?
Primary Wealth Accelerator: How are you accelerating your net worth and creating wealth? Or are you?
Wealth Perception: How do you define wealth?
Wealth Equation: What is your mathematical plan for accumulating wealth? What wealth equation defines the physics of your wealth universe?
Destination: Is there a destination? If so, what does it look like?
Responsibility & Control: Are you in control of your life and your financial plan?
Life Perception: How do you live your life? Do you plan for the future? Forsake today for tomorrow? Or tomorrow for today?
The Sidewalk
The sidewalk roadmap is equal to poorness. The Sidewalk point of view is “a contract for a pleasurable today in lieu of a more secure tomorrow”. The Sidewalker does not have a financial plan. Any surplus of money will be spent immediately, whether on the next gadget, the next trip, the next newer car, or the next fashionable style.
The Sidewalk is money blind. It doesn’t care about how much money you make. You can’t medicate poor money management with more money. Yes, you can look filthy rich and still be riding the Sidewalk. The example of a Rich sidewalker is a highly paid occupation that made a lot of money (it could be doctors, lawyers, actors, athletes, etc), wears expensive clothes, and drive nice cars but is one step away from financial meltdown. The sidewalk is governed by instant gratification and Lifestyle Servitude.
The Slow Lane
The Slow lane roadmap is geared toward mediocrity. In the slow lane chapter the contradiction of most financial beliefs, I have learned started. In the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book, the writer called it a Paradox of Practice. The writer says that the financial gurus hardly ever become rich because of the advice they preach in their book.
As for Robert Kiyosaki, he did not become rich because of leveraging his real estate teachings. Robert Kiyosaki becomes rich because he sells millions of books. The next author is Tim Ferris’s “4 Hours Work Week” book, the writer says Wealth’s road trip has no chauffeur and the toll can’t be outsourced to a virtual assistant in India. Ouch. The point is going through the journey to wealth by yourselves; don’t outsource it to someone else.
The Fast Lane
There is a theory mentioned in the book called The Law of Effection. Basically, in order to make millions, you must impact millions. In Fastlane, you engineer a business that touches millions of lives in scale or many lives of magnitude.
To light the Law of Affection and illuminate your Fastlane road, cross-examine it against the Five Fastlane Commandments (need, entry, control, scale, and time, abbreviated as NECST).
1. The Commandment of Need
Build a business that fulfills people’s needs. The writer says that nobody cares about your dreams or your business, what they care about is fulfilling their needs. Never start a business just to make money. Stop chasing money and start chasing needs. Most people probably start their business to “do what you love” and along the way focused on their desire instead of what their market needs.
2. The Commandment of Entry
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. Higher entry barriers equate to stronger, more powerful roads with less competition and less need for exceptionality. Easy access roads carry more traffic. More traffic generates higher competition, and higher competition creates lower margins for the participants.
The commandment of entry is basically said to accelerate a business, you should enter a market where fewer people doing it. Exceptionalism is required to overcome weak entry barriers.
3. The Commandment of Control
When you control your business, you control everything in your business-your organization, your products, your pricing, your revenue model, and your operational choices. If you can’t control every aspect of your company, you’re not driving! And if you can’t drive, you set yourself up for sudden, unexpected crashes.
Essentially, if you are doing a business where you don’t have full control over it, you are only a “hitchhikers” of the business itself, not a true “fast liner”. That includes MLM, franchisees, affiliate programs, etc which run a business but do not have real control over their business because someone else has set the price, system, product development, and so on.
4. The Commandment of Scale
Business is like baseball. Play on a field where you can hit home runs; don’t play on a field where they’re prohibited! For example, if you own a clothing boutique on Main Street, you violate the Commandment of Scale because your pool of customers is drawn from the local trading area. To break scale, the business owner needs to introduce leverage in the form of replication: Open more stores, sell franchises, or sell on the Internet.
Scale means how far your business can go. How big is your potential market, is it locally? Statewide? National or it can be leveled up to a worldwide scale? The larger the scale, the greater the potential speed, or leverage, of your Fastlane. Scale, magnitude, or source deficiencies create governors on the speed of wealth creation.
5. The Commandment of Time
As a Fastlane, your road should be traveled with the intention to make it automated. You want passivity and a living money tree. When you fail the commandment of time, the failure is caused by one of two obstacles. They are:
· You don’t have access to the seeds because your road started with a deficiency.
· The seeds won’t grow in infertile soil.
If your business is based on one of the money-tree seedlings, it should be capable of growing a money tree. Content systems, computer systems, software systems, distribution systems, and human resource systems are all seedlings to money trees.
The main point of this Commandment is your business should be able to be automated therefore it can give you free time. If you have to be attached to your business all the time, then it is considered a job, not a business owner. It is key to create a system and management that can run the business and give you passive income.
My thoughts
This book is a little bit different from the self-help books I have read so far. The unexpected part of the book that surprises me is that the writer shades other book authors in his book. The most mentioned authors are Robert Kiyosaki for his famous book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and Tim Ferris for his “4 Hours Work Week”.
M. J. DeMarco basically mentions that those two books are useless, and do not teach anything about building wealth. M. J. DeMarco state that wealth does not come from investing in a stock market. That is a slow-lane way of thinking. Additionally, he mentions that Robert Kiyosaki is rich because he sells millions of books, not because of investing in the stock market. On the other hand, building wealth cannot be done by outsourcing your task to virtual assistance as mentioned in Tim Ferris’s book. I read those 2 books before “The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime”, so I know what are those books about. While maybe there is some truth about them becoming millionaires by selling millions of books, there are still a lot of things I can learn from Robert Kiyosaki’s and Tim Ferris’ books. I personally think, discrediting other people’s books in your own book is not a really nice thing to do, or read. You can make your point without bringing other people’s work down.
ND PASSION 