PART 7: THE ROADS TO WEALTH
CHAPTER 29: THE RIGHT ROAD ROUTES TO WEALTH
He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end. ~ Henry Emerson Fosdick
Chapter 29 Quotes and Highlights
- millions. In the Fastlane, you engineer a business that touches millions of lives in scale, or many lives of magnitude. If your road doesn’t lead through Effection’s neighborhood or have an off-ramp onto it, sorry, you’re on the wrong road.
- A road meeting all five commandments can make you filthy rich fast. As violations accrue, the road degrades in its wealth potential, and with it, your ability to get near Effection also degrades. While it’s possible to violate one or more commandments and still create wealth quickly, you should aim for a road that satisfies all five commandments.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- 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.
CHAPTER 30: THE COMMANDMENT OF NEED
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other? ~ George Eliot
Chapter 30 Quotes and Highlights
- Ninety percent of all new businesses fail within five years, and I know why they fail. They fail because they fail the Commandment of Need.
- Businesses that violate the Commandment of Need either belong to the 90% failure category or masquerade as a job.
- Businesses that solve needs win. Businesses that provide value win. Businesses that solve problems win profits. Selfish, narcissistic motives do not make good, long-term business models.
- People care about what your business can do for them. How will it help them? What’s in it for them? Will it solve their problem? Make their life easier? Provide them with shelter? Save them money? Educate them? Make them feel something? Tell me, why on God’s green Earth should I give your business money? What value are you adding to my life?
- To succeed as a producer, surrender your own selfishness and address the selfishness of others.
- Stop thinking about business in terms of your selfish desires, whether it’s money, dreams or “do what you love.” Instead, chase needs, problems, pain points, service deficiencies, and emotions.
- You and your business attract money when you stop being selfish and turn your business’s focus from the needs of yourself to the needs of other people. Give first, take second. Needs come first, not money! Needs precede money! Engage the marketplace with your own selfish need and my bet is placed on your failure.
- Money isn’t attracted to selfish people. It is attracted to businesses that solve problems. It’s attracted to people who fill needs and add value. Solve needs massively and money massively attracts.
- The Fastlane allowed money to be removed from the equation. Now, I don’t need to get paid to “do what I love.” I just do it. In other words, money led to “do what you love,” it didn’t follow. How’s that for irony?
- when supply exceeds demand (need) prices move down. Not enough need, too much supply.
- You need a passion for something greater. It is different for everybody, but when you find it, you will do anything for it.
- “No passion” leads to mediocrity and the land of everybody. “No passion” leads to unhappiness. “No passion” equals no wealth.
- Passion comes from either excitement or discontent.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- The Commandment of Need states that businesses that solve needs win. Needs can be pain points, service gaps, unsolved problems, or emotional disconnects.
- Ninety percent of all new businesses fail because they are based on selfish internal needs, not external market needs.
- No one cares about your selfish desires for dreams or money; people only want to know what your business can do for them.
- Money chasers haven’t broken free from selfishness, and their businesses often follow their own selfish needs.
- People vote for your business with their money.
- Chase money and it will elude you. However, if you ignore it and focus on what attracts money, you will draw it to yourself.
- Help one million people and you will be a millionaire. For money to follow
- “Do what you love,” your love must solve a need and you must be exceptional at it. “Do what you love” sets the stage for crowded marketplaces with depressed margins.
- When you have the financial resources, you can “do what you love” and not get paid for it, nor do you have to be good at it.
- Slowlaners feed “do what you love” with “do what you hate.” Five days of hate for two days of love. “Doing what you love” for money can endanger your love. Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane success.
- Having a passionate “why” can transform work into joy.
- “Doing what you love” usually leads to the violation of the Commandment of Need.
- The right road for you is one that will converge with your dreams.
CHAPTER 31: THE COMMANDMENT OF ENTRY
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind. ~ Seneca
Chapter 31Quotes and Highlights
“In a gold rush, don’t dig for gold, sell shovels!”
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- The Commandment of Entry states that as entry barriers fall, competition rises and the road weakens.
- Easy access roads carry more traffic. More traffic generates higher competition, and higher competition creates lower margins for the participants.
- Businesses with weak entry often lack control and operate in saturated marketplaces.
- Exceptionalism is required to overcome weak entry barriers.
- Access to a business road should be a process with a toll, not an event.
- “Everyone” consists of the general populous and is served by the mainstream media.
- If everyone were wealthy, “everybody is doing it” would work. And if everyone is wealthy, then no one is wealthy.
- “Everyone is doing it” is a signal to overbought conditions and the entrance of “dumb money.”
CHAPTER 32: THE COMMANDMENT OF CONTROL
There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence on one’s self. ~ John Gay
Chapter 32 Quotes and Highlights
- A business hitchhiker seeks refuge from risk and cowers within the confines of a matriarchal organization. This subservient relationship renders a loss of control and leaves you vulnerable to the actions of the driver. 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 someone can “flip a switch” and destroy your business, you’re playing roulette with your financial plan.
- hitchhiking isn’t entrepreneurial, because at the heart of entrepreneurship is creation and innovation. Hitchhikers aren’t pioneers; they don’t create or innovate. They sell, operate, and manage.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- 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.
CHAPTER 33: THE COMMANDMENT OF SCALE
In business, to be a success you only have to be right once. ~ Mark Cuban
Chapter 33 Quotes and Highlights
- The bigger your pool of play, the bigger your potential for wealth.
- A business that lacks scale acts like a car with a speed governor that prevents acceleration.
- 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.
- Doctors who own practices and hire other doctors get full access to Effection and get rich.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- Your total pool of customers determines your habitat. The larger the habitat, the greater the potential for wealth.
- A business can be a singles or a home-run-based business. Its strength is determined by scale, which is derived by habitat.
- The Fastlane wealth equation is disarmed when you violate the Commandment of Scale. Scale is achieved in reach (units sold) and/or magnitude (unit profit).
- The Law of Effection is the primary conduit to wealth, which can be road blocked by scale, magnitude, or source.
- Effection consequences trickle up to owners and producers. Breaking scale or magnitude indirectly in an uncontrolled entity is not a guarantee of wealth.
- To gain access to Effection, you have to break the barrier of scale or magnitude in an entity you control.
- Scale, magnitude, or source deficiencies create governors on the speed of wealth creation.
CHAPTER 34: THE COMMANDMENT OF TIME
I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live only about a hundred years. ~ Thomas Edison
Chapter 34 Quotes and Highlights
- The Commandment of Time asks: Can this business be automated and systematized to operate while I’m absent?
- 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.
- As a Fastlaner, 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 cause by one of two obstacles.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- A business attached to your time is a job.
- business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time.
- To satisfy the Commandment of Time, start with a business that uses a money system seedling, or introduce one.
CHAPTER 35: RAPID WEALTH: THE INTERSTATES
You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. ~ John Wooden
Chapter 35 Quotes and Highlights
- Thou shalt not invest in a needless business. Thou shalt not trade time for money. Thou shalt not operate on a limited scale. Thou shalt not relinquish control. Thou shalt not let a business startup be an event over process.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- 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.
CHAPTER 36: FIND YOUR OPEN ROAD
At first, people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done, and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
Chapter 36 Quotes and Highlights
- Moral: Solve other people’s problems and you will solve your own money problems!
- Fastlane success resides in execution, not in the idea.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- 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.
CHAPTER 37: GIVE YOUR ROAD A DESTINATION
The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. ~ Benjamin Mays
Chapter 37 Quotes and Highlights
- money system in which you amass a lump sum large enough to earn monthly interest that will support your lifestyle needs. The second is a business system that spawns passive cash flow that supports your lifestyle AND simultaneously funds your money system.
- You can’t build a financial empire if you’re ignorant of basic finance and economics. These disciplines are the building blocks to a financial empire, and without them the Sidewalk becomes a danger.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
- The Fastlane is the means to your end because dreams cost money.
- Conquer big goals by breaking them down to their smallest component.
- Daily saving reinforces your relationship with money; it is your passive system that buys freedom and another soldier added to your army.
- A money system isn’t used to grow wealth but to grow income. Growing wealth should be left to your Fastlane road.
- You will struggle to build a financial empire if you are financially illiterate. “Live below your means” is relevant at any income level.
- For the Fastlaner, “Live below your means” means to expand your means.
- A financial adviser doesn’t solve financial illiteracy and literacy is insurance.
- Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.
