All right, so in this blog, I'm gonna summarise some of the insights from this book, The Millionaire Fastlane. I thought that this was gonna be really bad when a friend recommended it to me. And then this friend said, "No, trust me. Ignore the clickbait title, The Millionaire Fastlane, and read the book because it's genuinely really good. And it is genuinely really good".
This is probably the single best book I have ever read on how to build a business that makes money. And so in this episode of Book Club, which is the series where we distil and discuss highlights from some of my favourite books, we're gonna be breaking down five key lessons from the book. And also, the five commandments of building a business that MJ DeMarco talks about.
Lesson Number one: How to get rich quick:
Now, the first important lesson in the book is that we want to avoid the slow lane. And the point that our friend, MJ, makes in the book, is that "get rich quick" is often seen as, like, a scammy thing. Oh, it's a get-rich-quick scheme. But actually, it's not get-rich-quick that's a problem, it is get-rich-easy. Like it is very possible to get rich quick, and that is why we're talking about The Millionaire Fastlane. It's very possible to get rich quick, but it's not at all possible to get rich easy. And so, if someone is trying to sell you that it is easy to get rich, that is a scam and you should avoid it. And one of the interesting things that he talks about in the book is the idea that there are three paths through life.
There's path number one, which is the sidewalk. This path to the slow lane, and path number three, the fast lane. The sidewalk is basically where people who are living paycheck to paycheck living, people who don't have a lot of money. I'm not gonna talk about it too much. It's a bit disparaging. It's very American style. Sort of a very brash way of describing it that he does. Like, you know, "If you're living on the sidewalk, then you're living paycheck to paycheck." And like, "Your life is screwed because you believe that the government is screwing you over," all that kind of stuff. We're not gonna talk about that too much. There are a few bits like that in the book where you have to kind of read or listen to it with a little pinch of salt. But I think the second path through life, the slow lane, is interesting. Because if you follow the slow lane, you can still get rich. And the slow lane is generally, if you're reading this, probably your parents' generation stood by the slow lane.
The idea of the slow lane is that you know:
- you go to school.
- You get good grades.
- You get a decent job.
- You work your way up the ladder in your job, whatever your job is.
- You save some percentage of your paycheck.
- You put that into investments, maybe in the stock market, if you're particularly rogue.
But probably, you know, you should invest in property and real estate because the property is a good investment. And over time, eventually, you will have enough of a nest egg such that when you retire, then you will be rich. And you can enjoy your retirement at the age of 65 when you have osteoarthritis in both of your knees. That is, basically, the idea of the slow lane. And he talks about how there are three traps that we can fall into, which will end up keeping us on the slow lane. The first trap is that life in the slow lane looks like it's pretty safe. You can think that "Okay, once I get this job, then my life is pretty safe and I'm pretty sorted." But if the pandemic has taught us anything, and if, you know, the way the world is at the moment, A: it's actually not that safe.
You actually could lose your job. If you're, fine, if you're a doctor or something like that, where you're unlikely to lose your job, that's still pretty safe. But even so, what he says is that there is a tonne of other unexpected events that happen in life. Like if there's a market crash like there was in 2008, or if you have kids, Or if you get divorced. Or if you have a health problem and you live in a stupid country, like America, where that could potentially bankrupt you. There are all of these fairly common, unexpected events that can happen in life that make life in the slow lane not actually as safe an option as it might've been for our parents' generation.
The second trap that Slow Laners can fall into:
The second trap that Slow Laners can fall into is this idea that if we build our intrinsic market value enough, then we will get rich. So, for example, these are the people who think, "Okay, I've worked my job for two years. Now I'm gonna go and get an MBA and pay like however many tens of thousands of dollars to get an MBA. Because then once I have that degree, then I will be worth more to my future employer." But the problem with that style of thinking is that it's not really the fast-lane approach to building wealth. It is still, ultimately, trading your time for money. And yes, fine. If you get that extra degree if you get that extra qualifications, your time will be worth more. A little bit more, maybe even significantly more, but ultimately, you're still just trading your time for money. And that is a very slow-lane way to approach building wealth.
Third Trap that Slow Laners can fall into:
And the third trap that Slow Laners can fall into is just not even believing it's possible to get rich quick unless you're super lucky or super talented. But, as MJ says, even if you can't get rich easy, which is not a thing, you can get rich relatively quick, if quick is 10 years. 10 years is the definition of quick, which to be honest, it's pretty quick. But a lot of us, when we think "get rich quick", we're thinking a few weeks. That is not a thing. What he's arguing for is a process that will take probably around 10 years to get rich quick. And that is actually quick, in his book. And that brings us on to lesson number two,
Lesson Number two: Work the Procedure:
Now in the book, he talks a lot about how wealth is not an event. Like, getting rich is not this sort of binary thing where one day you're living paycheck to paycheck and the next day suddenly you've got millions in the bank. It is a long-drawn-out process that takes usually many years to do. But the problem is that the media often reports wealth as being an event, and those are the stories we latch on to. One of the stories he talks about is this guy, John Darius Bikoff, who founded Glaceau Vitamin Water in 1996. 11 years later he sold the company to Coca-Cola for 4.1 billion. And in that 11-year long story, the thing that people remember is the event. But what they forget is the process of 11 years that took so long to get to that point.
Therefore, wealth building is not an event, it's a process. And it's exactly the same thing with building a creative business, building a Bloggin site. You know, it's easy to see creators and their overnight successes, and all that jazz. But you don't see the five years they spent making Blogs that no one was watching to get to the point where they could then have the "event" of the overnight success.
Lesson Number three: Build Money Trees:
Now we've all heard that phrase that money doesn't grow on trees. But what he says in the book is "Money does actually grow on trees, provided you build a tree that grows money." So what does this mean? He says in the book, "Money trees are business systems that survive on their own. They require periodic support and nurturing, but they survive on their own, creating a surrogate for your time for money trade." Basically what we're doing is we're building a business. We're building this money tree where the amount of wealth we can generate is not directly tied to the amount of time that we're putting into it.
This brings us to the next question, which is how do we actually build a money tree? And he talks about, there's like four or five different types of money trees that we could potentially build. The first one is that we could build a rental system. And a rental system is basically anything that involves renting out something that you already own. So if you have a bunch of real estate properties, and you rent them out, that is a rental system. The problem is it's very hard to get to the point where you have a bunch of properties to rent out, 'cause you're already probably rich at that point. The other way of building a rental system is by licencing. For example, if you're a musician and you want to licence your audio that other people can use. In a way, they're paying your rent for this thing that you own. Secondly, what you could do is you could build a distribution system.
Now, this is basically a system that connects people who want something with the people who are supplying that thing. So for example, Amazon is a distribution system. It connects buyers with sellers and Amazon is the middleman. And therefore, if you build the middleman, if you build a distribution system, you can get really, really, really, really rich.
All right, the third type of money tree we want to create is a software system. Now, that's pretty standard. You make the software once and then you can charge people for the software or for the digital product. And then you can make money multiple times because the cost of distribution and the cost of replication is effectively zero.
I've made a bunch of software products in my time when I was in college. I built something called BMAT and UCAT Ninja, which was like a software platform that helped people get into med school by helping them prepare for the med school admissions exams. One of my Blogger friends, Attique, managed to make Rs 9,000 in a single week by selling icons that he designed. So that's a digital asset. He puts the work into creating it once and it's sort of like a software system whereby other people can just buy the thing because it is, ultimately, software. And the fourth system that our friend, MJ, talks about is my favourite kind. And that is the content money tree, the content system, where basically the idea is you create content.
So if you write a book, or make a blog post, or write a blog post, or make an online course that you can sell, ultimately, this is all content. It takes an investment of time and effort to write the book or create the content once. But then you can sell it to multiple people further down the line. And similar to the digital stuff, it has basically zero cost of replication and distribution, assuming it's on the internet. And if it's a book, well then, there are some costs associated with it. But it's still broadly a way of making money that's not tied to your own time. For example, like two years ago now, a year ago, or something, I made a Skillshare class about how to study for exams. And that class brings in about Rs 10,000 every single month in pure passive income.
And I don't do it- I basically do nothing to promote it. By the way, if you have exams coming up, check out my Skillshare class. But it's amazing how you can just do the work to make something once. It wasn't a get-rich-easy scheme. But it was like a money tree that built up over time and has now helped pay the mortgage on my house. So we've talked about the four different types of the money tree, but what MJ says in the book is that, and what's obviously true, is that it's not that easy to build one of these. You don't just magically have the ability to do that. And one of the ways that you can is lesson number four.
Lesson Number four: Switch from being a Consumer to being a Producer:
Now from a young age, society broadly teaches us that we should be consumers. And we should be thinking about what to buy, you know? Our parents are like, "Johnny, what do you want for your birthday?" "What are you gonna buy when you get that-" Or you know, "What would you buy if you had a million dollars if you won the lottery?" It's all very much based on being a consumer. But, as MJ tells us in the book, this consumer mindset is never gonna help us to actually build wealth. Instead, we need to think of a producer mindset. And this genuinely changes the way that you approach the world. Like if you think in the eyes of a consumer and you see some cool- I was in the Samsung store earlier today. It's fairly close to where I live. It's really cool. I'm thinking like a consumer-like, "Bloody hell, there's all these phones and watches and gadgets and fridges and microwaves and all this cool stuff. And the store is really nice.
Lesson Number five: Show Commitment, don't just show interest.
And this is a message that MJ talks about throughout the book. Basically, there's a difference between interest and commitment. And if you want to get rich quick, but not easy. If you wanna get rich quick, you have to do things that other people are not willing to do or not able to do. And usually, that shows commitment rather than just interest. And there's a nice quote from the book where he says that "Interest works in your business one hour a day, Monday through Friday. Commitment works in your business seven days a week, whenever time permits."
His Overall Point in the Millionaire Fastlane:
If you want to be on the Millionaire Fastlane, you have to follow all five of these commandments. You don't have to follow all five, like dropping one or two could still make you rich, but it's just so much more likely for you to become a millionaire quickly i.e. in under 10 years, which is isn't that quick. But quickly, if you follow all five of these commandments.
The first one is the Commandment of Need. And he says that 90% of businesses fail within the first five years because they don't satisfy the Commandment of Need. And the Commandment of Need is that people actually need the thing that you are offering. We have to create a business that provides value or solves people's needs or wants in some way. And if we're not, it's really, really hard to build a business based on something that tries to solve a problem that people don't actually have.
Secondly, we have the Commandment of Entry. And the idea here is that you ideally want to build a business in a zone where the barrier for entry is high rather than low. And the reason you want this is because a high barrier to entry means that it's very difficult for someone else to copy your business. For example, if you or I decided we wanted to start the next Amazon, that's really fricking hard. There is a very high barrier to entry to starting the next Amazon. But if there's a business that looks easy to other people to start, and there is a low barrier to entry, for example, starting a YouTube channel where the barrier to entry is low. Or starting a podcast where it's even lower. Or starting a blog where it's even lower than that. Or starting a TikTok with even lower than that. The lower the barriers to entry, the more competitive the landscape becomes.
The third one is the Commandment of Control. And that's the idea that at every step of the process, we want to be in control of the thing that we're trying to sell. And if we don't control things, like the price or the way it's managed or the way that it's being sold, then it's hard to build a business on that. This is partly why building a business or just a YouTube channel is very scary because it does not fulfil the Commandment of Control. After all, ultimately, my business lives and dies by these Blogs. That's really scary. That's really bad. I am not fulfilling the Commandment of Control in this business that I've got around these Blogs. And that's why when I make courses like my Part-Time Blogs, I try and fulfil the Commandment of Control by being in control of as much of that process as possible. This is also why MLM multi-level marketing schemes don't work because if you're selling someone else's product, who's also trying to get you to sell someone else's product, you ultimately don't really have the control over that process. And therefore, if stuff goes wrong or stuff is bad, you personally can't really influence it. And that's a very scary way to build a business.
Commandment number four is the Commandment of Scale. And that's the idea that ideally if you want to grow rich quick, the idea is you want to build a business that has the potential to scale up. For example, starting a barbershop and cutting people's hair for £10 a pop is not a business that has very much potential to scale unless you try and build up more and more and more barbershops and a chain of barbershops. But then, that costs loads of money. Whereas a software business or a content business really does have the potential to scale. So ideally, you to build a business that satisfies the commandment scale. And there's another thing that he talks about in the book that we haven't talked about in this blog, which is the Law of Effection. Basically, the law is that to make millions, you have to impact millions. (chuckles) And it's pretty simple. Like if you want to make millions off a YouTube channel, you have to be impacting millions of people. If you want to make millions off a business, you have to be impacting millions of people or impacting fewer people, but with a very large amount of impact. And so the Commandment of Scale kind of relates to that. You can't get rich quick off of selling lemonade in your local neighbourhood. You have to build a business that has the potential, at least, for scale.
And finally, we have the Commandment of Time, that the idea here, as we talked about before, is that you want to build a business where the value of the business is disconnected from your personal time input. If you have to show up every single day, nine to five or whatever many hours to make your money, then that's not really true wealth. And that is actually one of the problems with this YouTube business. As great as the content business is, I have to keep showing up time and time again, to write Blog posts like this one. It's kind of fun. I'm having a great time. And I would like to build a sort of business in the future. One where I really don't have to show up at all to continue to do the work. This is why writing a book is great because once you've written the book, people just buy it, assuming it's marketed well. And assuming it's a good book, of course, all that fun stuff.
Conclusion and Ending Sentences:
So that was a very, very long summary of some of the lessons in this enormous really, really good book, The Millionaire Fastlane, would recommend. If you're interested in more ideas on how to be able to make money, how to build passive income.
Thank you so much for Reading. Do Like this Effort of mine, if you aren't already. And I'll see you in the next Blog Post. Bye-bye. 🧡
Note:
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