If you want to become a millionaire in your 20s, or at whatever age, I want to lay out for you a blueprint that I’ve learned through an incredible book called “the millionaire fastlane”. It will not happen overnight, and it involves understanding that you need to change the approach you have to wealth creation, but by changing your system as we’ll discuss in this post you’ll manage to substantially increase your chances of joining the top 1% of the world’s earners.
We live in a world where everybody wants to get rich quick and thousands of gurus around the internet are supposed to tell you how to create a multimillion dollar business within 1 year. Ok. Let’s start from the beginning. You can get rich fast, but you can’t get rich quick and easy like these gurus tell you.
Are you still there? I know it sounds confusing, but let me explain.
Yesterday I picked up the book “The millionaire fastlane” by MJ DeMarco again after 3 years. I read it all in one breath and I realized I forgot how great this book is. What this book gives you is an outspoken, cynical advice on how you can get rich fast (but not easy!) and it shows black on white the big reason why almost nobody achieves wealth fast or even lives on the brink of bankruptcy. You are wrong, everybody has a great life and is rich… on instagram.
So in this post (and video) I want to share with you what I think is the real and only way to get rich and wealthy in a short period of time and I want to do this first by giving you some background on money thinking and then by giving you the final roadmap to wealth that this book suggests. In the end I will also give you some specific examples of types of businesses you can start.
So, there is a way to get rich fast, don’t worry, and it doesn’t involve scamming people, so if you want to get rich fast but you don’t want a false promise of a guru, then stay right where you are because in the next 10 minutes we are going to find out the real way.
Become a millionaire in your 20s: the basic message
The basic message I want to give you is, if you want to get rich fast: forget about the “Get Rich Slow” way of making money, which is “Go to school, graduate, get a good job, save 10%, invest in the stock market, max your 401k…then, someday, when you are, oh, 65 years old, you will be rich.”
And forget also the get rich quick schemes of the gurus, like:
“Create a landing page and start selling a course on how to sell a course although you don’t know how to sell a course, and in the meantime take some photos on a lended lamborghini for your instagram page”.
Instead of that, you need to create a system which will give you:
- Full control of the outcome, the work and the time you spend
- Leverage to earn much more than you will ever earn in a lifetime with a normal job
- The possibility to retire early and enjoy passive income, even while you sleep.
So, in 2 sentences as DeMarco would say: ignore the Get Rich Slow roadmap, go for the Fastlane. Sounds good so far, right?
Process, not event
But it’s all about process, not event. Even though we like to think self-made millionaires made their money overnight because of a lucky event, they actually had to go through a demanding, strenuous process. We just usually don’t see that. We never understand the whole process behind this event and hence we often associate wealth with luck. But all events of wealth are precluded by process, trial, risk, hard work, and sacrifice. In a nutshell: Process creates events that others see as luck. So the first concept we need to fix inside our head is that there is no result without effort, and no success without pain.
Wealth stands for 3 things, none of which is money.
So now I ask you: are you looking for money or wealth? Or both… well, this is a serious question though. Wealth stands for 3 things, none of which is money. For DeMarco, for example, wealth is based on 3 pillars:
- Family: Meaningful relationships with friends and family
- Fitness: Being healthy and physically fit
- Freedom (Choice)
Money comes into play only to provide us with the number 3, freedom.
So the real wealth is being able to enjoy family and friends, being healthy and having complete freedom to do whatever you like in life, because you are financially independent. If you have money, you have the freedom to live where you want, eat what you want, travel where and when you want and follow your hobbies. So ask yourself: what is it that you are looking for? Is it a rich lifestyle? Is it the freedom to cultivate your passions and hobbies without being tied to a regular job? Money is usually the highest motive for young people, but try to reflect on what it is that you really want to become or to have thanks to the money, before pursuing it.
The three social categories
In order to understand how to get wealthy, you first need to think like a wealthy person. And this is the most important message that probably all books about money teach, including this. As long as you don’t think about money like a successful person, earning more money will not make your life easier and you most probably won’t reach your desired financial destination. Basically there are 3 roadmaps to wealth according to DeMarco: the sidewalk, the slowlane and the fastlane. So understanding these three ways of thinking about money is essential to be able to create wealth.
The Sidewalkers represent probably at least 75% of the population and they are the people that “live for the moment”. They don’t plan for their future, spend most of their salary on material things and usually want to have more than what they can afford. Their goal is: instant gratification instead of delayed long term gratification.
The Slowline is already an improvement compared to the Sidewalk. It’s based on the concept that you need to study and then work hard your whole life, saving as much as possible, until one day at 67 years old you are rich, and if you are lucky, still alive. Basically a sacrifice of today in the hopes of a brighter tomorrow.
The slowline is an improvement, but being tied to a normal job 5 days a week you still don’t have the freedom that enables happiness in life. But don’t get down on yourself yet: many people that managed to create their system to become wealthy, did so while keeping their normal job to pay their bills and rent and at some point they had their breakthrough.
Wealth: The Fastlane Roadmap
Now let’s come to the interesting part: The Fastlane. This is, according to DeMarco, and I strongly agree with him, the only way to achieve wealth in a short period of time, whereas short means not 6 months, like gurus tell you, but a time between 2 and 10 years.
So, how does it work? First of all you need to build a system that you can leverage to generate an amount of money that grows exponentially without you having to increase your time invested exponentially. If you think about it, a normal job is based on a linear money-time equation. You work 40 hours, you get 500$. You work 80 hours, you get 1000$. You can easily see that you reach a limit that is given by the number of hours you can invest every week, and the salary itself is not going to increase so much in a short period of time. And it’s definitely not going to become millions. So to achieve this, you need control over the variables that you’ll use to leverage this growth.
Don’t get me wrong, none of these systems can be created without investing an enormous amount of work and time at the beginning, the so-called process we talked about before.
The fastlane might be fast, but it’s not a shortcut. There are no shortcuts. And this is the difference between the fake “Make money easy” and the true and possible for everybody “Make money fast”.
So what do you need to start driving on the fastlane? First of all, you need to reshape your life’s focus on producing, not consuming. Stop wanting the last smartphone, stop wasting money on restaurants or on clothes, and stop wasting your time, which is the most valuable asset you have. Instead, move your mindset from consumer to producer. Get to the other side, where people create something for the market instead of consuming what other producers have to offer.
The Fastlane equation
Wealth comes from two variables: your Net Profit and your Asset Value. Net Profit is what you get by selling a service or a product. As you can see, to achieve wealth you need to be able to sell something to people, be it a physical product or a service.
Asset Value represents the value of your business and the value of what you purchased with your money power, for example real estate or stocks.
So first you need to create a business and make it grow, making it become a valuable asset that produces Net Profits. After that, you can either keep owning this business to generate more net profit, or liquidate it as an exit strategy to obtain the asset value, which you can then reinvest in other assets for passive income and financial freedom.
Law of Effection
Ok it all sounds great, but many people try creating their own business and they end up working 80h a week for 50 years with less money than if they worked a regular job. So why are there some successful businesses and some unsuccessful ones? DeMarco explains it with the Law of Effection. The Law of Effection states that the more lives you affect, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become. Affect millions and make millions. So the first step through the fastlane that you should do is to brainstorm an idea which you know will either affect many people (scale) or affect them strongly (magnitude) or both.
Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires.
Ok, but how?
So, now you’ll say: “Oh, wow, I never thought that to become rich I need to create a business that makes me rich. What a great discovery!”.
Well, the book can’t tell you exactly which business you should open, because it depends on your interests and goals, but it does give an overview of different business fields which are more likely to work as a money tree and therefore give you passive income in the future.
Some of them are fields that are more difficult to enter, like distribution systems, software systems or real estate, but still nothing stops you from creating an interesting app or buying real estate. Nevertheless, there are other business fields which are more easily accessible to everyone.
One is creating a Content System, or system of information. This is my favorite and the one that is more easily accessible to everybody. You create a content system by putting your knowledge on a particular field available to the public. You can create a course on something you are passionate about and you have knowledge about, you can start a youtube channel like I did, or you can start a blog. Whatever passion you have, there is a way to put that content available on the internet and monetize it. But remember, there are no shortcuts. Creating a Content System means putting in a huge amount of effort for months, often for years, before seeing results. But the only way to achieve greater things tomorrow is to be willing to put greater effort today.
Creating a content system is in my opinion the best way, thanks to the ease with which you can open your own website or use platforms like youtube, skillshare or udemy to make your content available to the public. And you can basically choose whatever passion you have because there are always going to be people that share the same interest as you and that are going to enjoy listening to what you say.
But apart from content systems there is another way, which is starting a Human Resources Systems, basically a company with employees. If you have a particular passion or interest and you can’t or don’t want to exploit it on the internet, you can still start a physical company. At the beginning you can be alone, but probably at a certain point you’ll need to hire some staff. There is a really important concept here: Employees are usually necessary to expand your business over a certain threshold, but you always have to be careful because they can cause you to have to work more or less.
The fastlane commandments
So let’s say you did some brainstorming and have an idea for a business. How do you understand if the idea stands under the world of the fastlane? How do you understand if you’re going to be able to grow its value fast enough? MJ DeMarco offers 5 commandments of which your business idea should fulfill as many as possible, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense to start it. So let’s see these commandments and remember, your idea doesn’t have to fulfill all of them. Let’s break them down:
1. The Commandment of Control
The first one is the Commandment of Control. You need to be in complete control of your business. Even a Youtube channel like mine violates this commandment, because my boss in this case is youtube. The best would be if you create a business that is entirely yours. But still, you can start with a boss to get some experience and open your own thing later on.
2. The Commandment of Entry
The second is the Commandment of Entry. Try to look for a business that has some kind of high barrier of entry. It can be knowledge, money, contacts. You want to reduce competition as much as possible. If you start finding millions of videos and courses explaining how to enter a business easily, assume that many people will do it and it will be much harder to win against the competition.
3. The Commandment of Need
The third Commandment states the following: instead of doing what you love, do what people need. I kind of find myself in contrast with this, for one reason: it’s true that money comes from what people need, not from what you love, but it’s also true that if you don’t do what you love you will most likely give up at some point. To find a compromise between my idea and the one of MJ DeMarco, we could say that you should find a topic that you love, and then you should find something that creates value for others within the topic that you love.
4. The Commandment of Time
The fourth is the Commandment of Time. Once developed and matured, the system must be able to generate passive income. If you create a system or a business that will always need you, then you will always need to spend your time to make it run and you want to avoid that. So in an early stage you should already imagine if your idea will be, one day, a “self running system” or not. An exception to this is if you create a normal business, one that will always require your work and time, but at a certain point you sell it and use the money to buy some asset that gives you passive income.
5. The Commandment of Scale
And the last Commandment is the Commandment of Scale, which is the Law of Effection we talked about before. Basically, you can become a millionaire either because your product or service impacts enormously the people that buy it, or because it impacts a high amount of people. Magnitude or Scale. Magnitude is how much value you provide per person you affect. Scale is how many you affect.
Conclusions
So, in this video we described the road to wealth according to MJ DeMarco and his Fastlane. I hope the video was clear and if I could help you somehow or give you some value with it you can support me by subscribing to my channel and hitting the like button. In case there is a book or a topic that you’d like me to explore in a next video drop me a comment anytime. Thank you for coming by today, I wish you a great evening, be productive and I’ll see you in the next video. Ciao!
