Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • “Get Rich Slow” demands a long life of gainful employment.
  • “Get Rich Slow” is a losing game because it is codependent on Wall Street an anchored by your time.
  • The real golden years of life are when you’re young, sentient, and vibrant.
  • Fame or physical talent is not a prerequisite to wealth.
  • Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.

  • Change can happen in an instant.

  • All self-made multimillionaires create their wealth by a carefully orchestrated process. They have and use the entire formula. Despite what you may have read or heard, wealth is not an event. Wealth doesn’t drop from the sky or come from a game show. It doesn’t ring the doorbell and await you on the front porch with balloons and a check the size of a refrigerator. Wealth does not chime from a machine with spinning bars, lemons, and cherries.

  • Wealth is a process, not an event. Ask any chef and they will confirm that the perfect dish is a series of ingredients and a well-engineered process of execution: a little of this, a little of that, done at the right time at the right place, and wham, you have a tasty meal. Wealth creation has the same method of execution-a fabricated accumulation of many disassociated ingredients into an assembled whole that has value and is worth millions.  

  • Wealth eludes most people because they are preoccupied with events while disregarding process. Without process, there is no event

  • All events of wealth are preceded by process, a backstory of trial, risk, hard work, and sacrifice. If you try to skip process, you’ll never experience events.

  • The formula for wealth’s road trip is like a long road trip across the country. Success demands your focused exercise into the journey and the tools of that journey (process) as opposed to the destination (event). There are four constituent ingredients that make up the winning formula. They are:
    • Your Roadmap: The compass for the trip-your roadmap-is the guiding force behind your actions. Your roadmap makes up your financial belief system and your preconceived convictions about wealth and money. There are three roadmaps that will chart your course to wealth: The Sidewalk, The Slowlane, The Fastlane. Much like a recipe, your roadmap will outline why, where, how, and what.
    • Your Vehicle: Your vehicle is you. No one can drive the journey but you. Your vehicle is a complicated system composed of oil, gas, an engine, a steering wheel, a windshield, horsepower, and an accelerator-all needing frequent tuning and maintenance to ensure peak efficiency during the road trip.
    • Your Roads: Your roads are the financial pathways you travel. For example, you can travel the job road, and within that road you have limitless choices: You can be an engineer, a project manager, a physician, a plumber, a truck driver. Then there are entrepreneurial roads: You can be a real estate investor, a retail storeowner, a franchiser, an Internet marketer, or an inventor. Just like a road trip across the country, roads are plentiful with millions of permutations.
    • Your Speed: Speed is execution and your ability to go from idea to implementation. You could sit in a Ferrari on an empty, straight road, but if you fail to hit the accelerator, you fail to move. Without speed, your roadmap has no direction, your vehicle stands idle, and your road mutates into a dead end.

  • Wealth is a formula, not an ingredient.

  • Process makes millionaires. Events are by-products of process.

  • To seek a “wealth chauffeur” is to seek a surrogate for process. Process cannot be outsourced, because process dawns wisdom, personal growth, strength, and events.    

  • Your current financial situation is a product of your existing roadmap, whether chosen or not. Your roadmap guides your actions, and the consequences of those actions have created your financial life. How your life unfolds is determined by your choices, and these choices originate from your belief systems, and those belief systems evolve from your predisposed roadmap. If you want to change your life, change your choices. To change your choices you must change your belief system. Your belief system is defined by your roadmap.

  • Each roadmap contains key mindsets that act as signposts, or “mindposts,” that provide direction and guide actions, just like a roadmap. Those mindposts 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 is 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?
  • Each roadmap is governed by a wealth equation and predisposed to a financial destination-Sidewalk to poorness, Slowlane to mediocrity, and the Fastlane to wealth.  

  • A Sidewalker’s financial destination doesn’t exist. The plan is to have no plan. Surplus money is immediately spent on the next great gadget, the next trip, the next newer car, the next fashionable styles, or the next hot fad. Sidewalkers are carelessly trapped in a “Lifestyle Servitude” fed by an urgent, insatiable need for pleasure, image, and instant gratification. This perpetuates a cascading cycle that spins faster every month, increasing the velocity of the burden, forever enslaving the Sidewalker to their job or their business.

  • A first-class ticket to the Sidewalk is to have no financial plan.

  • The Sidewalk’s natural gravitational pull is poorness, both in time and money.

  • You cannot solve poor financial management with more money.

  • You can be income rich and still ride the Sidewalk dirty.

  • If wealth is defined by income and debt, wealth is an illusion, because it is vulnerable to potholes, detours, and “bumps in the road.” When the income disappears, so does the illusion of wealth.

  • Poor financial management is like gambling; the house eventually wins.

  • Wealth is not authored by material possessions, money, or “stuff,” but by what I call the three fundamental “F’s”:
    • Family (relationships)
    • Fitness (health)
    • Freedom (choice)  

  • Within this wealth trinity is where you will find true wealth and, yes, happiness.

  • Wealth is strong-spirited familial relationships with people. Not just your family, but with people, your community, your God, and your friends. At the end of the iconic movie It’s A Wonderful Life we’re given the final lesson: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.” This reflects on the importance of having your life shared with friends, family, and loved ones. Wealth is making a difference. Wealth is community and impacting the lives of others. Wealth cannot be experienced alone in a vacuum. Believe me, the richest moments of my life occurred when I was surrounded by a family of friends and loved ones. Second, wealth is fitness: health, vibrancy, passion, and boundless energy. If you don’t have health, you lack wealth. Ask any terminally ill person what they value. Ask any cancer survivor how they suddenly feel reborn and happiness is displaced from “stuff” to people and experiences. There is no price on health and vibrancy. And finally, wealth is freedom and choice: freedom to live how you want to live, what, when, and where. Freedom from bosses, alarm clocks, and the pressures of money. Freedom to passionately pursue dreams. Freedom to raise your children as you see fit. And freedom from the drudgery of doing things you hate. Freedom is the liberty to live your life as you please.

  • Money secures one agent of the wealth formula, freedom, which is a powerful guardian to wealth’s sibling ingredients: health and relationships.  
  • Money buys the freedom to watch your kids grow up. Money buys the freedom to pursue your craziest dreams. Money buys the freedom to make a difference in the world. Money buys the freedom to build and strengthen relationships. Money buys the freedom to do what you love, with financial validation removed from the equation.  

  • Are any of the above likely to make you happy? I bet they will. They certainly won’t make you unhappy.

  • Like wealth, luck is created by process, not by event.

  • Luck is created by increased probabilities that are improved with the process of action.

  • If you find yourself playing the odds of “big hits,” you are event-driven, not process-driven. This mindset is conducive to the Sidewalk, not the Fastlane.

  • “Get Rich Quick” infomercial marketing is a Fastlane because savvy marketers know that Sidewalkers place faith in events over process.

  • Moneymaking “systems” are rarely as profitable as the act of selling them to Sidewalkers.    

  • The Slowlane is a natural course-correction from the Sidewalk evolving from taking responsibility and accountability.

  • Wealth is best experienced when you’re young, vibrant, and able, not in the twilight of your life.

  • The Slowlane is a plan that takes decades to succeed, often requiring masterful political prowess in a corporate environment. For the Slowlaner, Saturday and Sunday is the paycheck for Monday through Friday.

  • The default return on your time in the Slowlane is negative 60%-5-for-2.

  • The 5-for-2 trade inherit in the Slowlane is generally fixed and cannot be manipulated, because job standards are five days a week.

  • The predisposed destination of the Slowlane is mediocrity. Life isn’t great, but it isn’t so bad either.  
  • The Fastlane Roadmap contains the same mindposts or behavioral characteristics that drive the Fastlaner’s actions along the journey. They are:
    • Debt Perception: Debt is useful if it allows me to build and grow my system.
    • Time Perception: Time is the most important asset I have, far exceeding money.
    • Education Perception: The moment you stop learning is the moment you stop growing. Constant expansion of my knowledge and awareness is critical to my journey.
    • Money Perception: Money is everywhere, and it’s extremely abundant. Money is a reflection of how many lives I’ve touched. Money reflects the value I’ve created.
    • Primary Income Source: I earn income via my business systems and investments.
    • Primary Wealth Accelerator: I make something from nothing. I give birth to assets and make them valuable to the marketplace. Other times, I take existing assets and add value to them.
    • Wealth Perception: Build business systems for cash flow and asset valuation.
    • Wealth Equation: Wealth = Net Profit + Asset Value
    • Strategy: The more I help, the richer I become in time, money, and personal fulfillment.
    • Destination: Lifetime passive income, either through business or investments.
    • Responsibility % Control: Life is what I make it. My financial plan is entirely my responsibility and I choose how I react to my circumstances.
    • Life Perception: My dreams are worth pursuing no matter how outlandish, and I understand that it will take money to make some of those dreams real.  

  • These mindposts are what formulate the Fastlaner’s lifestyle. It drives action.

  • 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.

  • I’ve never bought a product on late night television, because I’m on the same team. As a producer, I see the infomercials for what they are: producers (the minority) serving the consumer (the majority). The “act nows,” the “but wait, there’s more!” the “free bonuses”-these are marketing weapons in a producer’s arsenal. I watch infomercials not to buy, but to see what the pros are doing.  

  • As producers, our job is to entice consumers to buy. As a producer locked into a producer mindset, I attract wealth because consumers seek producers. Consumers are the majority who demand their fill!

  • 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.  
  • While the centrist theme to the Slowlane is a job, in the Fastlane, it’s a business. Yes, good old self-employment. I know, not breaking news for “get rich” books, however, it’s important to note that most small business owners are light years away from a Fastlane and dickering with Slowlane metrics. Some businesses masquerade as jobs!  

  • A Fastlane business is the key to the Fastlane wealth equation (Wealth = Profit+ Asset Value) because it unlocks LEVERAGE, a new set of wealth variables that are unlimited and controllable, whereas in the Slowlane, they are limited and uncontrollable.

  • Asset Value = (Net Profit) X (Industry Multiplier)  
  • Any time you have an asset that has sustainable profits, an industry multiplier governed by prevailing market conditions determines the valuation of that asset. Other people or companies will buy that asset based on the asset’s net profit multiplied by the assessed multiple.  
  • For example, if you own a manufacturing company that nets $100,000 and the average multiple for your industry is 6, your asset value is worth $600,000. Industry multipliers are subject to intense negotiating as they rise and fall with the economy and within industry sectors.  

  • Can you see now why some 30-year-olds are worth $50 million and some are worth $13,000? The Fastlane universe operates on gains of 1,700% and millions, while the Slowlane universe 8% and 40. One plan is about HOPE while the other is about CONTROL. Breaking news: 8% and 40 makes millionaires in 40 years: 1,700% and 16 million makes billionaires in four years.

  • 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.

  • There are five business seedlings to money trees.
    • Rental Systems
    • Computer/Software Systems
    • Content Systems
    • Distribution Systems
    • Human Resource Systems

  • Fastlaners eventually become net lenders.

  • 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.

  • You can’t pay yourself first if you don’t own yourself. Your vehicle (you) must be free and clear. When you have a job, someone owns you. And when someone owns you, you aren’t paid first, but last.  

  • The first step to controlling your vehicle-you-is to own yourself so you can truly pay yourself first and the government last. That is accomplished by shelling your business into a corporation that you control.

  • Worst Case Consequence Analysis (WCCA) requires you to become forward-thinking and an analyzer of potential consequences. WCCA asks you to answer three questions about every decision of consequence:
    • What is the worst-case consequence of this choice?
    • What is the probability of this outcome?
    • Is this an acceptable risk?  

  • While these three questions might seem lengthy, your analysis process shouldn’t take longer than a few seconds. You don’t need a pen or paper, just your head and a conscious choice of perception. When choices are analyzed using WCCA, potential disasters are exposed and alternatives can be chosen. Unnecessary roads of treason can be bypassed.

  • 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.

  • The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.  
  • Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I’ll show you someone who probably isn’t very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don’t need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.  

  • Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.

  • Your Lifespan = Free Time + Indentured Time  
  • “Free time” is yours to spend as you please: TV, a jog in the park, video games, sleeping, eating, vacation. If you’re like most, your free time is lumped on evenings and weekends, where time is not exchanged for money.  
  • “Indentured time” is the opposite: It’s the total time spent earning money and the consequences of that spent time. When you awake in the morning, shower, dress, drive to the train station, wait, ride to work, and then work for eight hours-this is indentured time. When you spend your entire weekend “recharging” from the workweek, this is indentured time. Indentured time is actual work and the work you must do for the work. Morning rituals, traffic, compiling reports at home, solitary “recharges”-whatever time spent earning a buck is indentured time.  

  • If you won the lottery, you’d quit your job because indentured time is no longer required and is suddenly replaced with free time. Money buys free time and eliminates indentured time. However, the irony of your free time is it isn’t FREE; it’s bought and paid for by your indentured time. You enjoy a two-week vacation because it was paid for by a year of indentured time. You can relax with a cold beer on the couch because you paid for it earlier in the day with eight hours of indentured time. Indentured time becomes the ransom of your free time.

  • There’s the right time and the wrong time. The right time is free time; indentured time is the wrong time. The Slowlane ransoms time-time at the job and time invested in the markets. Remember, five indentured days for two free days is a bad trade! A financial plan with time as the adjudicator is not a good financial plan.

  • If you were born into slavery, your life would be 100% indentured time with 0% free time. While total time can’t be manipulated, you can manipulate your time ratio. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one day of indentured time and six days of free time? If you can steal free time from the hands of indentured time, life will have more of the “right time” versus the “wrong time.”

  • 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.

  • 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.  
  • N – (Entry) – C – S – T  
  • 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. Low-barrier-entry businesses are weak roads because easy entry creates high competition and high traffic, all of which share the same pie. And where there is traffic, there is no movement.  

  • In other words, if “getting into business” is as simple as paying $200 for a distributor kit, there are no entry barriers, and the opportunity should be passed. If any Joe Blow napping behind Chan’s Chinese restaurant in the alley next to a dumpster can start your business in minutes, it isn’t a business you want to be doing! The world is littered with so-called businesses that have no entry barriers. And that is why they suck and the people who follow them aren’t rich.

  • 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.    
  • Billionaire Mark Cuban recently wrote on his blog that it doesn’t matter how many times you strike out in business because you only have to be right once, and that “once” can set you up for life. In other words, be in the business of home runs.  
  • 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.  

  • Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs engage in “singles-only” businesses. Their playing field is stunted. Their road screams “Speed Limit: 15.” The home run is impossible and their habitat shriveled. If you’re a massage therapist, you won’t awake one day and have 10,000 patrons outside your door. There is no leverage! And if you don’t have leverage in the Fastlane equation, you don’t have a chance! The Commandment of Scale is like a tollbooth on the road to the Law of Effection!

  • The Commandment of Scale demands a business that maximizes the Fastlane wealth equation. Give the Law of Effection a chance! Give wealth a chance! How do you know if your business (or potential business) honors the Commandment of Scale? Ask:
    • Can the net income of this business scale limitlessly, say, from $2,000 per month to $200,000?
    • Can the asset value of this business scale into the millions?
    • Can this business impact millions? Or does it impact hundreds? Is its customer pool the world or a small community in the city?
    • Can this business be replicated and expanded beyond the local trading area by franchising, chaining, or additional units?
    • Best-case scenario, what is the units-sold potential? One hundred or one hundred million?
    • Best-case scenario, how pliable is unit profit? Does it have magnitude?  
  • If you can’t affirm these questions, you might be stuck in a restrictive business where wealth creation is stifled.  

  • Tiny habitats create tiny wealth. Scale is large numbers. Think big, nationally, and globally. Big numbers, or scale, is the inroad to The Law of Effection. To make millions, you must affect millions. That doesn’t happen in a small store on Main Street, but in hundreds of stores across the country

  • 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. Returning to my friend’s coffee shop, his “units sold” variable within the Fastlane wealth equation is restricted because his cafe is confined to a local community. His sales are mathematically caged to a stiff number-scale is absent. He will never sell coffee to someone in New Zealand. A business that lacks scale acts like a car with a speed governor that prevents acceleration.    

  • My friend’s only option to break scale would be to purchase more franchises in more locations. If he owned 29 franchises across the state, he suddenly would be serving 6,000 coffees per day. Scale becomes prevalent, and attached to scale is the Law of Effection. Of course, the optimum Fastlane strategy is not buying franchises, but selling them.

  • If my friend doesn’t want to own multiple franchises he can’t break the barricade of scale. Without scale (units sold) or magnitude (high unit profit) he drives a business that will produce a weak asset value. His wealth equation becomes retarded and the Law of Effection quarantined, remanding him to a middle-class work-life existence. With a middle-class income and a weak asset valuation, he defects to a wealth equation emblematic of the Slowlane.        
  • The other barricade to Effection is Magnitude. Because our coffee shop owner is restricted in scale, his other option is scale by magnitude. Unfortunately, the magnitude road is also closed. Unit profit cannot be manipulated. Every sale won’t generate a profit of greater than a few bucks and raising prices reduces units sold. A $100,000 profit on each coffee sold is impossible.        
  • While direct access to the Law of Effection is a foolproof road to wealth, indirect access isn’t so clear, since Effection always trickles up to owners and producers, not down to employees or consumers. For example, if you work as a doctor at a private-care facility, you could argue that you have magnitude and therefore, you should be rich. In fact, all doctors should be rich since they have magnitude, right? Not exactly. The fault in this presumption is that the Law of Effection honors only those in control.        

  • That private health-care facility? The facility’s owner receives the full benefit of Effection, not the doctors he hired. The doctors on staff aren’t guaranteed access to Effection, because they don’t control the system. Can they be rich anyway? Sure, but that decision is left to intrinsic value evaluations to be made by the owner of the system. Doctors who own practices and hire other doctors get full access to Effection and get rich.

  • The Commandment of Time requires that your business detach from your time. Can your business substitute for you and blossom into a money tree? Passive income is a Fastlane objective that comes from the Commandment of Time.

  • Owning a business doesn’t guarantee wealth or detachment from time. Some business owners are married to their businesses because their businesses violate the Commandment of Time. The business ostensibly becomes a job and a lifelong prison sentence. While giving up your heart and soul for a business is perfectly normal in startup, growth, and maturation stage, it isn’t a prescription I’d want to endure for 40 years.  
  • The Commandment of Time asks:
    • Can this business be automated and systematized to operate while I’m absent?
    • Are my margins thick enough to hire human resource seedlings?
    • Can my operation benefit from the introduction of a money tree seedling?
    • How can I get this business to operate exclusive of my 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. Would you rather work 10 hours a week and earn $60,000, or work 70 hours a week for $140,000? I’d take the former over the latter every time.

  • 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.

  • Poorly met needs are open roads when they often appear closed. Successful businesses take existing ideas, services, and products and simply make them better, or spin them in new directions.

  • 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.    

  • 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 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.

To start your Fastlane financial road trip strap on the F-A-S-T-L-A-N-E S-U-P-E-R-C-H-A-R-G-E-R, which is an acronym for the Fastlane process.  

  1. Formula (Fastlane supercharger): 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.  
  2. Admit (fAstlane supercharger): Admit that the preordained path to wealth, “Get Rich Slow,” is fundamentally flawed because of Uncontrollable Limited Leverage, weak mathematics predicated on time (Wealth = Job + Markets). Admit that “Get Rich Quick” exists. Admit that “no plan” is not a good plan. Admit that luck is the residue of engagement.  
  3. Stop and Swap (faStlane supercharger): Stop following the wrong roadmaps. Stop doing what you’ve been doing. Stop selling your soul for a weekend. Stop thinking that 401(k)s and mutual funds will make you rich. Swap ineffective roadmaps for the Fastlane roadmap. Swap your allegiances from consumer to producer.  

  4. Time (fasTlane supercharger): Time is the king asset of the Fastlane-specifically, free time. Invest in activities that will grant free time. Avoid time thieves, such as parasitic debt that transfigures free time into indentured time. Invest time into a business system that can transform indentured time into free time. Make decisions with time as a key decision factor.

  5. Leverage (fastLane supercharger): Leverage controllable and unlimited mathematics to create wealth. There is no leverage within the Slowlane wealth equation, an equation predicated on time (hourly pay, annual salary, annualized return, years invested). If you can’t control the mathematics that predetermine your wealth, nor accelerate them into large numbers, you can’t control your financial plan. Leverage is harnessed by a system that does the work for you.  
  6. Assets and Income (fastlAne supercharger): Wealth is accelerated by exploding income and Asset value via a business that can be systemized and eventually sold in a liquidation event. Live below your means but seek to expand your means by focusing on income while simultaneously controlling expenses. Exponential growth of income and asset value, not slashing expenses, creates millionaires.  
  7. Number (fastlaNe supercharger): What’s your Number? How much money will you need to live a lifestyle of your choosing? Determine your number, break it down by the penny, and make it real today. Start saving your loose change, open a brokerage account, and put a chart on your office wall that continually monitors your number’s progress. Make your dream lifestyle real by posting photos of that lifestyle at your workspace. For example, if you want a cabin on a mountain creek, find a picture of that vision and put it on computer so you have to see it every day. Make your visions of the future real and force them into your psyche so you’re constantly reminded. If your dream is a Ferrari, buy a die-cast Ferrari model and put it in your car or on your desk. Make those dreams real and inescapable!  

  8. Effection (fastlanE supercharger): Grace Effection and you shall be graced with wealth. 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.

  9. Steer (fastlane Supercharger): Life’s Steering is choice. At some point, you must commit to the Fastlane ideology, and that commitment forms your process. Wealth is not a choice of event, just like you cannot choose to lose 100 pounds and suddenly wake up 100 pounds lighter. How you steer determines whether the Fastlane is a lifestyle or a hobby. To enforce good decisions at the extremes, deploy WCCA and WADM. Decision horsepower is strongest in youth and bleeds with age. Examine your past choices. Why are you where you are? What has been treasonous to your life? Why are you drowning in debt? If you don’t rectify the mistakes of your past choices you will be destined to repeat them. Behavior change begins with a reflection of your past choices and modifying them for the future to reflect a Fastlane mindset. Become responsible, followed by accountable.  
  10. Uncouple (fastlane sUpercharger): Officially Uncouple from the Slowlane wealth equation by creating your business structure in a favorable Fastlane entity: a C- or S-Corporation, or an LLC. Thereafter, your entity is the body of your surrogate business system. It “pays itself first” and the government last. It survives time separate from your time. It is your first step at creating an asset.  
  11. Passion % Purpose (fastlane suPercharger): With a business entity and a dollar figure that outlines your dream life, you will need a Passion and a Purpose to fuel you into habitual action. Don’t confuse “passion” with “do what you love.” Passion burns your soul and drives you to do whatever it takes. Passion revs you with excitement and enrages you with discontent. Some passions are selfish (I want a Lamborghini) and other passions are selfless (I want to help orphaned children). It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as the passion burns hot enough to burn a hole in your pants and gets you embroiled into process.  
  12. Educate (fastlane supErcharger): 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. Seek Fastlane knowledge that fosters the construction and operation of business systems in an environment that you control. Get to the library and get on the Internet. Information is the oil on your financial journey. Ensure daily reading in short bursts by leveraging existing blocks of time often squandered: the train, the plane, while exercising, on lunch break, an hour in the morning before work, or while waiting at the post office.  
  13. Road (fastlane supeRcharger): Get onto a Fastlane Road. But don’t worry if you can’t decide which road to travel; the road can pick you. Train your mind to see needs and problems. Observe your thoughts and language, because they expose unmet needs, or needs met poorly. You don’t have to find the next breakthrough; just find a problem, a pain-point, or a service gap, and solve it. Many of the best businesses in the world are based on products that already existed; the owners solved the problem better. When you focus on needs, problems, inconveniences, and issues, roads open. Yes, the road chooses you.  
  14. Control (fastlane superCharger): Control your financial plan as this refers to the Commandment of Control. Engage in an organization that you fully control, from pricing to marketing to operations. Fastlane entrepreneurs don’t cede control over critical business functions to hierarchical control structures, because they are the control structure. Swim as a shark, not a guppy.  
  15. Have (fastlane supercHarger): HAVE what others NEED and money will flow into your life. This reflects the Commandment of Need. 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. Cast aside selfishness and seek to HAVE what your fellow man WANTS. When you do, money flows into your life because money is attracted to those who have what others want, desire, crave, or need.  

  16. Automate (fastlane superchArger): Automate your business and honor the Commandment of Time. Get your time detached from your business. The best passive-income money-tree seedlings are money systems, rental systems, computer systems, content systems, distribution systems, and human resource systems. The key to automation in any business lies in these seedlings.

  17. Replicate (fastlane superchaRger): Replicate your system and honor the Commandment of Scale. Get on a playing field where home runs can be hit. To make millions, you must impact millions. To impact millions, you must be on a field capable of affecting millions! Can your product, service, process be replicated on a global scale to tap the Law of Effection?  
  18. Grow (fastlane supercharGer): Grow your business by treating it multi-dimensionally, like a game of chess. Build a brand, not a business. Treat customers like your boss and reposition complaints to opportunities. Listen to the world as they offer the best directional clues. Resist commoditization. Differentiate yourself from the competition. Get above the noise. Focus on one business and one business only.  
  19. Exit (fastlane superchargEr): Have an Exit strategy. Full passivity accomplished by a money system is one Fastlane destination. Money systems are best funded by liquidation events of massive asset values. Know when it’s time to liquidate your assets, transforming paper money into real money. Know when it’s time to get off the horse and learn to ride a new one.  
  20. Retire, Reward, or Repeat (fastlane superchargeR): After liquidating your asset(s), Retire or Repeat. Regardless of which, Reward yourself for milestones met everywhere along the journey. Sell your first product? Celebrate! Go to dinner, buy a cigar, drink a beer. Break $100,000 in net worth? Treat yourself to something nice. Book a joint-venture deal? Celebrate with an indulgence. Go over $1 million? Take a nice vacation. Break $10 million? Buy a Lamborghini.