Chapter 20: Recruit Your Army of Freedom Fighters
The best money tree that exists wasn’t mentioned in the previous chapter. And it’s money.
Money pays you interest -> there is nothing more passive than that.
3% interest on 12.5 million is 375k per year, or 1k per day.
What can you do with 1k per day?
Well, a lot.
The problem with the money money tree is that you need to become rich in order for it to work.
Build an asset -> make millions -> sell it for millions -> invest these millions -> make money without doing anything.
Every dollar you earn has the potential to make many more -> money is your army.
And this is where you see how compound interest should not be used to become rich, but to stay rich.
The fastlane uses the 5% stock market yield to generate thousands of millions.
Chapter 21: The Real Law of Wealth
The Law of Attraction is great, but if you spend your time merely thinking, you’ll never get rich.
Replace the Law of Attraction with the Law of Effection.
The more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and magnitude, the richer you will become.
Impact million -> make millions.
If you are a receptionist, your value to society is low -> you are not making any money.
If you design software for hotel receptionists, your value to society is high -> you are making a lot more money.
The amount of money you have = the value you delivered to society.
Effection = scale or magnitude (or both).
To make money, you need to greatly impact a few people (build houses), or to impact a lot of people (sell phones).
If you greatly impact a lot of people, you’ll be a billionaire.
Net profit = Units Sold (scale) X Unit Profit (magnitude)
The closer you get to the source of large numbers, the closer you will get to wealth.
Think big to earn big.
Part 6: Your Vehicle to Wealth: You
Chapter 22: Own Yourself First
You are responsible for making the journey.
When you earn money from a job, the company owns you and you get paid last.
-> you need to break from that and own yourself.
Chapter 23: Life’s Steering Wheel
What’s the cause of poverty? It’s not a lack of money (lack of money is the consequence.)
The cause of poverty is poor choices.
-> you are the sum of your choices and choices are the steering wheel of your life.
Look at anyone who is poor, and you will see a series of poor choices.
- Watching TV VS reading a book
- Getting a credit card you can’t afford VS saving money
- Partying VS working on a side hustle
What is chosen today will impact you forever.
Some tiny choices (driving drunk VS learning how to code) can further change your life forever (dying or going to jail VS starting a software company).
Choose well, live well.
Your choices are your life’s steering wheel.
Make the right choices time and again, and you will succeed.
Chapter 24: Wipe Your Windshield Clean
You can choose your actions, and you can also choose your thoughts.
Actions are determined by perceptions and beliefs.
If you believe in an idea, you are likely to act in accordance with that belief.
-> making better choices is a matter of upgrading your perceptions and beliefs.
You know which mindset you have by looking at the words you use.
“I think”, “maybe”, “I am unsure”, “I never”, “I can’t”, “not my fault” etc reek of lack of confidence.
So, how do you upgrade your beliefs?
Find the people that have what you have and look at the beliefs that they have.
If you want extraordinary results, you are going to need extraordinary thinking.
You are going to need to make better choices.
Use these two tools to do so.
- Worse Case Consequence Analysis (WCCA)
- Weighted Average Decision Matrix (WADM)
WCCA
The matrix asks you to answer three questions.
- What is the worst-case consequence of this choice?
- What is the probability of this outcome?
- Is this an acceptable risk?
WADM
This tool is for big decisions when you have a range of options.
It will simply assign a number of points to each option according to a range of factors.
Let’s take an example: staying in Belgium VS moving to Spain.
Write all of the factors you use to make your decision.
Assign each of them a score between 1 and 10.
Eg: safety in Belgium: 1. Safety in Spain: 9.
Then weigh each factor according to it importance (Safety gets a 10 because it is the most important to me; finding a girlfriend gets a 2 because I can do that anywhere).
Then multiply the grade by the importance factor (Belgium gets 10 in safety, Spain gets 90).
| Factors | Belgium | Spain |
| Safety (10) | 1 → 10 | 9 → 90 |
| Cost of living (price of meat + rent) (9) | 6 → 54 | 7 → 63 |
| Job opportunities and ease to find a job (8) | 5 → 40 | 7 → 52 |
| Ease of starting a business + taxes (7) | 5 → 35 | 4 → 28 |
| People (6) | 1 → 6 | 9 → 54 |
| Weather (5) | 0 → 0 | 9 → 45 |
| Salary (4) | 8 → 32 | 5 → 20 |
| Language (3) | 8 → 24 | 6 → 18 |
| Finding a girlfriend (2) | 1 → 2 | 5 → 10 |
| Total | 203 | 380 |
Spain is a clear winner (to be honest I didn’t need the WADM to know that).
So get your eyes off your past now, and focus on the road ahead.
The universe doesn’t care about your past.
The only person that does is you.
If the universe doesn’t remember, why should you?
It’s not because you were called an idiot as a kid that it actually makes you so.
Just because you have no skills doesn’t mean you can’t start learning and building a great company.
Don’t allow your past to determine your future.
Chapter 25: Deodorize Flatulent Headwinds
Society will always try to prevent you from taking action to become successful.
People will tell you you’re dumb and that “you can’t do it” because they themselves believe it is impossible – and proving them otherwise would hurt them.
Who are these people?
- Friends and family
- Institutions
- The media
- Slowlane gurus
- Your environment
Extraordinary wealth demands extraordinary beliefs.
Anyone that doesn’t empower you, slows you down.
This is why you should seek an ideal environment. If the depressed people you live with drag you down, go somewhere else. If the weather drags you down, go somewhere else. If your job drags you down and traps you, do something else.
Chapter 26: Your Primordial Fuel: Time
People waiting hours in line for a free bucket of fried chicken value money more than time, which is dumb.
Money is infinite, time isn’t.
At the end of the day, we all die.
Your life will be made of two types of time: free time and indentured time.
Free time is time when you can do whatever you want.
Indentured time is the time you spend making money.
-> money buys free time.
Attack everything that devours your time to maximize free time to work on your business.
One of these is parasitic debt, which forces you to work a 9-5 to buy something you neither need nor can afford.
Just stop.
Time is king. Use it wisely.
Chapter 27: Change That Dirty Oil
What you know today is not enough to get where you want to be tomorrow.
-> you need to upgrade your knowledge and learn new stuff.
When you constantly learn new knowledge and new skills, new roads and opportunities open.
Fastlane education is education that aims at improving and growing your business.
Slowlane education is education that aims at improving your skills as an employee.
Today, most of the knowledge is online. Just consider Youtube: you can learn anything for free there.
Find other education resources here.
Your education doesn’t end at the graduation ceremony. It starts.
Chapter 28: Hit the Redline
The redline is a rock-solid commitment.
Fastlane businesses aren’t built in a day.
Are you interested, or committed?
Interested won’t cut it.
Interest reads a book -> commitment applies it.
Interest wants to start a business -> commitment files the paperwork.
Interest is quitting after the third failure -> commitment is trying until success.
How willing are you? Most people aren’t.
This separates the winners from the losers.
Know that the sweat of success is failure. If you avoid failure, you will also avoid success.
Failure is not a bad thing. It’s what it takes to succeed. It’s better to try and fail than to regret never trying.
And in the fastlane, you only need to succeed once.
While the fastlane is taking a risk, it’s taking a good risk.
There are two types of risks: smart risks, and moronic risks.
Smart risks (launching a small company with €1k) have limited downside and unlimited upside: you whether lose the €1k, or you make millions off it.
Moronic risks (driving drunk) have unlimited downside and limited upside: you whether go home and sleep in your bed in a best-case scenario, or kill someone (or yourself) and spend 25 years in jail in a worst-case scenario.
So, what prevents people from committing to something?
Excuses. “Someday”, or “tomorrow”, when:
- “The economy gets betters”
- “The kids have grown up”
- “I get a promotion”
But the problem is that tomorrow never comes because there is no such thing as the perfect time to start.
Opportunity doesn’t care about timing. When it passes, you need to grab it, or it will be gone forever.
The best time to start is now.
Part 7: The Roads to Wealth
Chapter 29: The Right Road Routes to Wealth
The road of a fastlaner is a fastlane business. That distinction is important.
A Deli where you work 12h/day every day may be a business, but it is not fastlane.
A chain of Deli where other people work 8-10h for you five days a week is a fastlane business.
As we said, to make millions, you have to impact millions.
A fastlane business rests on five commandments.
- The Commandment of Need
- The Commandment of Entry
- The Commandment of Control
- The Commandment of Scale
- The Commandment of Time
