Millionaire FastLane Book Club | Part 6 - Week 6 - Chapters 22-28

Millionaire FastLane Book Club

Hey guys, week six, part six of the Millionaire Fastlane. Today we'll be covering chapters 22 through 28.

Chapter 22 touches on the formation of a business. MJ gives us a little insight into the types of business formation available to us. C Corp, LLC, and S Corp. He advises not to be a sole prop or a partnership as you have none of the tax protection or benefits of the other formation types. I'm not an expert on this area but I can tell you my business is setup as an LLC which elects to be taxed as an S Corp. We get the simplicity and protection of an LLC but the tax advantages of an S Corp or C Corp in that we can pay ourselves a "reasonable salary" which is subject to higher tax rates and payroll taxes and can take the rest of our money out in dividends which are not subject to payroll taxes and taxed at a lower rate.

This chapter touches on choices and mindset. We are the sum of our attitude and our choices. This reminds me of two quotes I heard a lot growing up. One is from my father and my grandfather who always said if you think you can or think you can't you're probably right. This is a spin on the famous Henry Ford saying. The other is from my great Uncle who was an amazing guy, grew up in Chicago during the depression, became a Priest and later a Bishop and lived in the Amazon rain forest for something like 60+ years. He would ask me if I've done something or been somewhere and I would say no. He would tell me don't say no, say not  yet. Basically setting yourself up for success mentally. Not that you won't do something but that you havn't done it yet. Kind of like MJ Demarcos instance of the kid asking to take a picture of his car and saying I need to get a lot of pics because I'll never own one of these. Take down the mental blocks.

Choices, if your unhappy with where you are it's the choices you've been making that got you there. If you want or expect different results make different choices. If you need a change of environment or some other type of change make it. MJ talks about how he knew he was more effective in a sunnier climate so he moved to Arizona. What choices are you making right now that aren't getting you the results you want? Make a change today.

You control your attitude and your path. There's a great Colon Powell quote to the effect of extreme positivity is a force multiplier or something like that. Having a positive attitude and being enthusiastic about business, learning and life is what successful people do.You may have to fake it at first but act as if and act as if until you actually become that thing. Reminds me of the Amy Cutty Ted Talks speech.

Success isn't a single choice it's hundreds or thousands of choices you make every day. Working on your blog or ecom store instead of going out with your buddies. Teaching yourself a new skill by reading blogs and watching Youtube videos instead of watching "The Bachelor", etc.

While this wasn't mentioned in the book it's a fact that over 40% of your day is nothing but routine. It's things you just do because it's your routine. Start forming different and positive routines and it will begin to happen on autopilot.

Watch out who you spend your time with. Many if not most high performance people, self help coaches, successful people all echo the idea that you are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with. If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, you've heard that whole thing. If your spending your time with people who fart around in Sports Bars after work every day that is what your trajectory is. Get toxic people and people not inline with your goals out of your life and get positive people in it. How do you do that? Go to entrepreneur meetups, connect with people via forums and online. Get a new circle of friends.

Trajectory, another thing mentioned in this book. When you hit a golf ball head on it goes straight. IF your angle of your club is even a milimeter off during contact even though it's only off a small amount during contact the trajectory of the ball will wind up being possibly hundreds of yards off course when it lands. How can making a small change in your behaviors and habits today, even very small, have a very big effect on your trajectory 6 months down the road, a year down the road, 5 years down the road?

Don't be like other people. The natural trajectory of society as a whole and most people is mediocre. If you want to be mediocre follow others, if you want to be extraordinary blase your own path, do your own thing.

Debt and materialistic things are not what wealth or happiness is. Everything you buy means you have to work more which means more "indentured time". Everything has 2 expenses, the Dollar cost and the amount of time you have to work to make that money. Think about that when you buy stuff. Now when your rich go ahead and splurge if you want because it doesn't affect your time or lifestyle but if you don't have the ability to pay cash and not notice the expense think long and hard over whether that purchase is necessary.

Brick walls aren't there to keep you down, they are there to only allow the people who really want it through.

I really like the end of this part. It hits a lot of points I notice of many entrepreneurs. Many people use excuses like I don't know how or I don't have time. 99% of the time questions people ask me are things they could Google and find the answer to in 30 seconds but they don't bother. They ask a question and wait for my response. It's one thing if you try to Google the answer, run into a problem and need assistance witha  specific aspect but asking me " Can I sell on Amazon if I live in Germany" is something someone could easily Google. If there's something in the answer that confuses me by all means ask about that specific issue but the general question is something people can figure out easily on their own.

Education does not end after high school or college. Education or skills become stale. You need to coninually strive to educate yourself and update your skills, make yourself more valuable. I don't know how isn't an answer, teach yourself how. MJ went to school for something completely different than computer science but taught himself to program.

I don't have time isn't an excuse. Notice how I make alot of Youtube videos in the car? If I didn't do that I may tell myself, I couldn't post a video this week because I don't have time. I made time and not only that, as MJ says, I killed two birds with one stone. Rather than wasting time in traffic or driving to work I turn that time into something productive. Turn your drive, your workouts, waits at the dentist office, time on the toilet, into education time and not wasted time.

I love how the chapter ends, talking about interest vs intent. I have a lot of people comment on my videos who are interested in being an entrepreneur. Who are interested in getting into ecommerce. Who maybe want to dabble in it, dip their toe in. Then I have other people who are intent on it. The people who are intent on it don't talk about how hard of a worker they are, they start a project. The people with intent don't spend 5 minutes setting up a store and then spend 6 hours looking for someone to hold their hand, they sit up til 3am watching Youtube videos and trying over and over until they get it. Are you interested in becomming self employed and an entrepreneur or are you intent on it?

One last thing I wanted to touch on is he talks about Gurus and courses. He talks about people spending 50k on a real estate course which has the same information someone could get out of a free book from the library. People want others to hold their hand, to walk them through something, etc. As I said in my last video about the Amazon course, everything out there is free. I went on to say if a course if reasonably priced and taught by someoen knowledgeable and you feel it will cut down the learning curve and save you time which equates to money it's worth it. As MJ says though, if a course is outlandishly priced its probably not worth it. I give almost everything away for free on this channel and in my writing. Sure you have to take in the knowledge and maybe organize it a bit since I can be all over the place but everything someoen is going to charge you $2500 in a course for I am giving away.

PART 6: YOUR VEHICLE TO WEALTH:

CHAPTER 22: OWN YOURSELF FIRST

Events and circumstances have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Chapter 22 Quotes and Highlights

• The best business structures for your Fastlane business are:
  • C corporation
  • S corporation
  • Limited liability corporation
• For small startups, I recommend either an LLC or an S corp. Stay away from partnerships and sole-proprietorships, as they do not limit liability.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• “Pay yourself first” is fundamentally impossible in a job.
• To own your vehicle (you), start a corporation that formally divorces you from the act of business. Your corporation is the body of your surrogate.
• The recommended Fastlane business entity is a C corp, an S corp, or an LLC.

CHAPTER 23: LIFE’S STEERING WHEEL

Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself. ~ Robert F. Bennett

Chapter 23 Quotes and Highlights

• If you retrace poverty’s footprints you will find that poorness starts at the exact same place: choice. Poor choices are the leading cause of poorness.
• If you approach wealth like a big pharmaceutical company and attack symptoms while neglecting problems, you will not succeed. Feeling tired? Take this pill. Want to lose weight? Another pill. The problems are ignored while the symptoms are addressed in catatonic cycles. I refused cholesterol medication because it addressed the symptom, not the problem. The problem is poor diet; cholesterol is the symptom.
• you are exactly where you decide to be. And if that’s unhappiness, you need to start making better choices.
• Youthful choices radiate the most strength and fabricate the trunk of your tree. As the branches ascend topside through time, they get thinner and weaker. They don’t have enough power to bend the tree in new directions because the trunk is thick with age, experience, and reinforced habits.
• My motorcycle crash had significant horsepower because I feel it today. If you are unmarried with five kids by age 23, where do you think the branches of your choice tree will lead? How thick and unbendable is your choice tree? If you skip classes and are drunk for four years in college, how will that ripple through your choice tree? If you’re best friend is a drug dealer, where will that branch lead?

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• The leading cause of poorness is poor choices.
• The steering wheel of your life is your choices.
• You are exactly where you chose to be.
• Success is hundreds of choices that form process. Process forms lifestyle.
• Choice is the most powerful control you have in your life.
• Treasonous choices forever impact your life negatively.
• Your choices have significant horsepower, or trajectory into the future.
• The younger you are, the more potent your choices are and the more horsepower you possess.
• Over time, horsepower erodes as the consequences of old choices are thick and hard to bend.

CHAPTER 24: WIPE YOUR WINDSHIELD CLEAN

Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be. ~ Charlotte P. Gilman

Chapter 24 Quotes and Highlights

Ever wrestle with a tough decision? One day you favor option A and the next day you flounder back to option B. Wouldn’t it be great if making a tough decision were a simple as picking the higher number?

HelpMyDecision.com

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Your choices of action manifest from your choices 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 reality.
• 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.

CHAPTER 25: DEODORIZE FLATULENT HEADWINDS

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities. ~ Oscar Wilde

Chapter 25 Quotes and Highlights

• Go into a kindergarten class and ask the kids how many of them can sing. EVERY hand will go up. Fast-forward 13 years and ask the same class of seniors the same question. Only a few hands will go up. What changed? The kindergarten kids believed they could sing because no one had told them otherwise.
• If you aren’t mindful to this natural gravity, life can denigrate into a viscous self-perpetuating cycle, which is society’s prescription for normal: Get up, go to work, come home, eat, watch a few episodes of Law and Order, go to bed . . . then repeat, day after day after day.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• The natural gravity of society is not to be exceptional, but average.
• Toxic relationships drain energy and detract from your goals to be extraordinary.
• The people in your life are like your comrades in a battle platoon. They can save you, help you, or destroy you.
• Good relationships are accelerative to your process, while bad relationships are treasonous.

CHAPTER 26: YOUR PRIMORDIAL FUEL: TIME

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. ~ Antoinette Bosco

Chapter 26 Quotes and Highlights

• 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.
• Fastlaners understand that time is the gas tank of life. When the gas tank runs dry, life ends. Time is the greatest asset you own, not money, not the 1969 restored Mustang, not grandpa’s old coin collection. Time. The fact is all of us are on a sinking ship. Is your time treated as such? Is it treated fairly or carelessly? Or is your primordial fuel squandered as if the tank will never run empty?
• Now, since you don’t have 8,000 years of life, isn’t it logical to conclude that money is an abundant resource while time is not? You can always acquire more money, but you cannot defy mortality. The irony of financial fortune is that no matter how much you have, you’ll die flat broke. You cannot escape the continual combustion of time as your tank drips time every second. You can live in blissful happiness or in a miserable depression—time is indifferent and it just bleeds away. Since time is scarce, wouldn’t it make sense not to waste 3 hours of your life for a $6 bucket of chicken?
• “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 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.”
• Parasitic debt is everything you owe the world. It is the excrement of Lifestyle Servitude. Your shiny new Infiniti financed at 60 monthly payments, your home mortgage financed over 30 years, your fancy designer clothes four months removed from out-of-fashion, and yes, even that insidious furniture that seemed like such a good idea at the time.
• The leading cause of indentured time is parasitic debt. Surely you’ve heard the phrase” thief of hearts.” When it comes to parasitic debt, it is the “thief of lives.” Parasitic debt is a gluttonous pig that gorges on free time and shits it out as indentured time. Any debt that forces you to work is reclassified from free time and shifts it to indentured time.
• Value your time poorly and you will be poor. When time is wasted as a lifestyle choice you will be stranded in places you don’t want to be.
• The inconvenient saver gladly wastes time to save money.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• 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.

CHAPTER 27: CHANGE THAT DIRTY, STALE OIL

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. ~ Albert Einstein

Chapter 27 Quotes and Highlights

• expansion of his knowledge to facilitate a Fastlane system. I voted yes.
• You don’t know because you haven’t taught yourself how, nor have you wanted to “know how” badly enough.
• I saw a picture the other day of a student publicly protesting one of the government financial bailouts. She hoisted a large placard that read: “I’ve got a 4.0 GPA, $90,000 in debt and no job—where’s my bailout?” Where’s your bailout? Let me tell ya, walk into the bathroom, flip on the light-switch and look in the freaking mirror.
• we producers know: People are lazy. People want it handed to them. People don’t want to read and connect the dots; they want it done for them. People want to be steered. They want someone to drive their vehicle. People want events, not process,

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Fastlaners start their education at graduation, if not before.
• A Fastlaner’s education serves to advance their business system and their money tree, not to raise intrinsic value.
• Fastlaner’s aren’t interested in being a cog in the wheel. They want to be the wheel.
• I don’t know how” is an excuse dismantled by discipline.
• Infinite knowledge is everywhere and it’s free. What’s missing is discipline to assimilate it.
• You can become an expert in any discipline not requiring physical skills. Educational recharges can occur within time blocks already allocated for other objectives.
• Organizers of expensive seminars take advantage of Sidewalkers and disenfranchised Slowlaners by marketing empty promises as “events.”

CHAPTER 28: HIT THE REDLINE

If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough. ~ Mario Andretti

Chapter 28 Quotes and Highlights

• The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!
• 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 paychecks from broke. Most people won’t invest long hours into their business system while friends are living it up on credit. Most people will allow friends and family to deflate their dreams with “that won’t work” directives. Most people start excited and gush with exuberance but give up at the first pothole or failure. Most people succumb to “I quit” and give up not knowing that they are one or two plays away from a touchdown—the Fastlane exponential growth curve.
• questioning, commitment, and rebirth. Fastlane success requires an investment toll of time and effort. This is the toll that makes you special and keeps everyone else OUT. This Redlined effort cannot be bypassed nor outsourced. Prime your expectations for work and sacrifice, know your destination, envision your dreams, ready your means, and know that you are simply paying the toll because you don’t want to trade 5-for-2 for life! If you don’t do the hard work that Fastlane opportunity demands, someone else will. And if you aren’t like everyone, you will discover something miraculous: You can live unlike everyone.
• The sweat of success is failure, and I am soaking wet. If you’ve taken a step, spin, or aerobics class, you know the objectives: to sweat, to get your heart rate up, to build cardiovascular endurance, and to lose weight. If you went to a cardio class and the instructor forbade sweating, it would negate its purpose. Hard work naturally produces sweat, and sweat becomes evidence of your effort. Unfortunately, this ludicrous analogy is the paradox you face if you fear failure and refuse to release the brakes. The sweat of success is failure. While you can’t build cardiovascular endurance without sweating, you can’t experience success without failure. Failure is simply a natural response to success. If you avoid failure you will also avoid success.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Interest is first gear. Commitment is the Redline.
• Hard work and commitment separates the winners from the losers.
• Some choose short-term mediocre comfort over long-term meteoric comfort.
• To live unlike everyone else, you have to do what everyone else won’t.
• Arm your expectations to hard work, sacrifice, and other bumps in the road. These are the land mines where the weak are removed from the road and sent back to the land of “most people.”
• Failure is natural to success. Expect it and learn from it.
• One home run could set you financially secure for your life, perhaps generations.
• Home runs can’t be hit in the dug out. Moronic risks have unlimited downside (long term) and limited upside (short term). Intelligent risks have unlimited upside (long term) and limited downside (short term.)
• There is never perfect timing and waiting for “someday” just wastes time.