The Millionaire Fastlane

If you want to keep getting what you're getting, keep doing what you're doing.

If you aren't wealthy, STOP doing what you're doing. STOP following the conventional wisdom.

“Get Rich Slow” criminally asks you to trade your freedom for freedom.

“road to wealth” codependent on Wall Street and anchored by time with your life wagered as the gamble is a dirty rotten alley.

What they teach doesn't work, but selling it does.

Old age is not a prerequisite to wealth or retirement.

Believing that old age is a precursor to retirement is the real BS.

If the journey devours 50 years of your life, is it worth it?

The object of life is not to be on the side of the masses, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

College was a five-year prenatal employee brainwashing with graduation as the overrated climax.

I viewed college as indoctrination into corporate droneship; an unfulfilled marriage between me and a life of jobs, bosses, and being overworked and underpaid.

my new life was a small studio apartment in central Phoenix that rented for $475 per month. I transformed my studio apartment into an office. No bedroom set, no furniture, just a mattress that invaded the kitchen.

I aggressively marketed my Web site. I sent out emails. Cold-called. Mailed letters. I learned search engine optimization (SEO). Because I couldn't afford books, I visited the Phoenix library daily and studied Internet programming languages. I improved my Web site and learned about graphics and copywriting. Anything that could help me, I consumed.

My income was tied to my time, the construction of Web sites. More Web sites jobs meant more time spent, and if I didn't work, my income would stop. My time was being sold off for money.

“lead generation” in Web space

Thousands of people benefited from something I created, which addicted me to the process.

Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.

The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

You can't crack wealth's code with one variable in a multi-variable equation.

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.

Process is the road trip to wealth: The destination shines as an event, but it's found by process.

The Fastlane process demands sacrifices that few make, to resolve to live like few can.

There is no wisdom or personal growth gained in a journey that someone else does for you.

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

Wealth is a formula, not an ingredient.

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.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. ~ Lewis Carroll

If you want to change your life, change your choices. To change your choices you must change your belief system.

To force change, change must come from your beliefs, and your roadmap outlines those beliefs.

You can't medicate poor money management with more money.

accessories, and hobbies are commensurate

Financial discipline is blind to income.

More money doesn't buy financial discipline.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Society has conditioned us to believe that wealth is an absolute construct perfected by material possessions.

Family (relationships) Fitness (health) Freedom (choice)

“Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”

Wealth is making a difference. Wealth is community and impacting the lives of others. Wealth cannot be experienced alone in a vacuum.

the richest moments of my life occurred when I was surrounded by a family of friends and loved ones.

wealth is fitness: health, vibrancy, passion, and boundless energy. If you don't have health, you lack wealth.

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.

Priorities: Some want to look rich, while others want to be rich.

Faux Wealth Destroys Real Wealth

The irony of looking wealthy is that it is an enemy to real wealth: It destroys freedom, it destroys health, and it destroys relationships.

Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.

the real thief of happiness: servitude, the antithesis of freedom.

The irony is that when most people earn “more money,” it doesn't add freedom, it detracts. By creating Lifestyle Servitude, more money becomes destructive to the wealth trinity: family, fitness, and freedom.

The World Value Survey concluded that “consumerism” is the leading obstacle to happiness.

there are many millionaires and well paid career folks who are absolutely miserable, and it has nothing to do with the money. It has to do with their freedom. Money owns them, instead of them owning their money.

The well salaried workaholic who is never home to strengthen the relationship with his wife and kids is likely to be less happier than the poor farmer in Thailand who spends half his day tending to his fields and the other half with his family.

Normalcy Is the Rat Race, a Modern-Day Slavery

You're conditioned to accept normal based on society's already corrupted definition of wealth, and because of it, normal itself is corrupted. Normal is modern-day slavery.

If you're held hostage to your lifestyle, you aren't wealthy, because you lack freedom.

We equate the corrupted definition of wealth with happiness, and when it doesn't deliver, expectations are violated and unhappiness is the consequence.

there are plenty of poor people who live richer than their overworked upper-middle-class counterparts because the latter lack freedom, they lack solid relationships, and they lack health-all deleterious effects of working a hated job five days a week for 50 years.

Money secures one agent of the wealth formula, freedom, which is a powerful guardian to wealth's sibling ingredients: health and relationships.

Sidewalkers are embroiled in Lifestyle Servitude, where life is forced into a rat race, a constant tug-of-war between lifestyle extravagances and work, a self perpetuating merry-go-round of work for income, income for lifestyle, and lifestyle for work.

Wherever there's Lifestyle Servitude, there's a systematic erosion of freedom.

Work creates income. Income creates lifestyle/debt (cars, boats, designer clothes). Lifestyle/debt forces work. Repeat …

Instant gratification is a populous plague and its predominant side effects are easily spotted: debt and obesity.

If you can't immunize yourself from the temptations of instant gratification, you'll be hard pressed to find success in either health or wealth.

Instant gratification is the bait and Lifestyle Servitude is the hook.

When instant gratification entices you to bite the bait, you become a casualty of the hook: Lifestyle Servitude.

Know wealth's enemies and what actions invite those enemies into your life.

Money doesn't buy happiness because money is used for consumer pursuits destructive to freedom. Anything destructive to freedom is destructive to the wealth trinity.

Money, properly used, can buy freedom, which can lead to happiness.

Happiness stems from good health, freedom, and strong interpersonal relationships, not necessarily money.

Lifestyle Servitude steals freedom, and what steals freedom, steals wealth.

If you think you can afford it, you can't.

The consequence of instant gratification is the destruction of freedom, health, and choice.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I'm not lucky; I'm a player of the game.

Self-Made Millions Arise from Self-Made Luck

Process creates events that others see as luck.

luck is a product of process, action, work, and being “out there.” And when you are “out there” you stand a chance at being in the right place at the right time.

Like wealth, luck is not an event but an aftereffect of process.

Luck is the residue of process.

Sidewalkers love events but hate process. It's only natural for Sidewalkers to assume wealth is luck, because they believe wealth is an event.

Force your process out into the world and you can defy the odds of “being in the right place at the right time.”

Sidewalkers are ripe for swindling because they seek events and want to avoid process. When this becomes ingrained into your mindset, infomercial pitches suddenly become the evening's entertainment.

wealth is not about luck but about process improving probabilities.

only you can deliver yourself to true wealth.

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

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

“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.

Responsibility is the price of greatness. ~ Winston Churchill

The Law of Victims says you can't be a victim if you don't relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.

When you bequeath control to others, you essentially become a hitchhiker with no seat belt.

People who don't take responsibility are victims. Some of them are born victims and, instead of trying to improve their hand, they fold and give up. For them, everyone has the solution to their problems but them. And their problems? Not their fault. Nope, someone else is to blame. Instead of looking within, they look outward and project responsibility to some other entity.

You are a victim of your own malfeasance.

Wealth Demands Responsibility, Followed by Accountability

Responsibility is the forefather to accountability, but one doesn't evidence the other.

Accountability is being culpable to your consequences and modifying your behavior if need be to prevent those consequences.

You can be responsible while not being accountable.

Immunize Yourself from Victimization

Stop being a victim by taking responsibility, followed by accountability.

“Who's the idiot, the idiot himself or the idiot that hires the idiot?”

Own your mistakes, failures, and triumphs.

when you own your decisions, something miraculous happens. Failure doesn't become the badge of victimhood-it becomes wisdom.

You deserve what your actions earned, or haven't earned.

Taking responsibility is the first step to taking the driver's seat of your life. Accountability is the final.

Responsibility owns your choices.

What if I told you 'insane' was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane? ~ Steve Buscemi (Con Air, Paramount Pictures, 2003)

You can either live rich young or live rich old while risking death along the way.

Wealth is best lived young and enjoyed while you have health, vibrancy, energy, and yes, maybe even some hair.

Wealth is best lived in the prime of your life, not in its twilight after 40 years of 50-hour workweeks have pulverized your dreams into surrender.

A strategy that requires your life and your dreams to be paid as penance is a sucker's bet.

Have you become so numbed by making a living that the living has been sucked out of your life?

Life does not begin on Friday night and end Monday morning.

Wealth's provenance evolves from the three Fs: family, fitness, and freedom.

For me, every day is a Saturday because I haven't sold off Monday through Friday.

Friday evening is glorified because people celebrate the dividends of their trade: five days of work-bondage exchanged for two days of unadulterated freedom. Saturday and Sunday is the paycheck for Monday through Friday, and Friday evening symbolizes the emergence of that payment, freedom for two days. The prostitution of Monday through Friday is the reason “Thank God it's Friday” exists. On Friday, people are paid FREEDOM in the currency of Saturday and Sunday!

The 5-for-2 return on investment is a negative 60%. If you make consistent negative 60% return on investments, you'd go bankrupt quick.

Monday through Friday is prostituted for Saturday and Sunday. While people easily recognize and reject a negative 60% return on their money, they do it willingly with their time.

People who are bankrupt with time see their freedom, their families and their relationships disintegrate.

Five days of servitude for two days of freedom is not a good trade unless you trade time into a system that can give you a better return on your time.

wealth is defined by freedom, and if you require proof, look no further than Friday night when people celebrate freedom as the Slowlane dictatorship takes a weekend furlough.

Normal Is Condemnation to Mediocrity

The Slowlaner accepts an existence of frugality and sacrifice to a tipping-point where life feels like incarceration.

The Slowlane plan forsakes the now for a faint promise of a wealthy future.

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

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.

If you're shackled to a job, you're engaged to a glorified exchange of your time (your life) for pieces of paper that grant you freedom. You sell your freedom to get freedom. Pretty stupid, huh?

Experience comes from what you do in life, not from what you do in a job. You don't need a job to get experience.

Which experience is more important? The experience of a menial job designed to pay your bills? Or the experience (and failures) of creating something that could provide you financial freedom for a lifetime without ever having to hold a job again?

Local, state, and federal governments heavily tax earned income and your options to shield that income from taxation is limited to contributions to 401(k)s and IRAs-which are also limited-10% of your income or a maximum of $16,500, whichever is less.

If you diligently trade your life and ascend into corporate management, expect 50% of your money to disappear before it touches your hands.

A job chains you to a set grade of experience. A job takes away your control. A job forces you to work with people you can't stand. A job forces you to get paid last. A job imposes a dictatorship on your income.

In a job, you sell your freedom (in the form of time) for freedom (in the form of money).

Experience is gained in action. The environment of that action is irrelevant.

Wealth accumulation is thwarted when you don't control your primary income source.

Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows. ~ Michael Landon

Uncontrollable Limited Leverage, or ULL

To accumulate financial wealth, you need to attract large sums of money. To attract large sums of money, you need two things: 1) Control and 2) Leverage.

Uncover the mathematics behind the plan and you uncover its weakness!

When the Slowlane is deconstructed, you find two variables: 1) The “primary income source,” which defines how income is earned, and 2) The “wealth accelerator,” which defines how wealth is accumulated.

If you earn $50,000/year, you can't miraculously demand to work 400 years in your life. Time has no leverage.

Whether you're paid hourly or annually-it doesn't matter-you can't leverage time!

Behind limited leverage is another corrosive wealth killer-no control. Can you control your employer? Can you control your salary? Can you control the economy? Can you earn $50,000 one year and next year bank $50 million? Can you control anything about your job, including your measly 4% pay raise? You might think you can by job-hopping, but you can't. Control is weak, if not absent.

Wealth creation via compound interest requires the passing of time and lots of it. Like a job, compound interest, or market investments such as mutual funds and 401(k)s, can't be leveraged nor can they be controlled. They rely on deficient math to create wealth.

They don't tell you that a 15% return year-after-year is impossible unless you invest with Bernie Madoff or Charles Ponzi. They don't tell you that in 40 years you'll be dead, and if you're not, you'll be close. They don't tell you that in 40 years, your $2.5 million will likely be worth $250,000 in today's dollars and that a gallon of milk will cost $12.00. They don't tell you that this method of wealth acceleration is not what they use. They don't tell you plenty, and yet you're supposed to believe it without question.

The only way to subvert the mathematical weakness of compound interest is to start with a large number, and large numbers require leverage!

Think about it. Have you ever met a college student who got rich investing in mutual funds or his employer's 401(k)? How about the guy who bought municipal bonds in 2006 and retired in 2009? I wonder if that guy driving a $1.2-million car can because of his well-balanced portfolio of mutual funds?

the youthful rich are not leveraging 8% returns but 800%! Has your wealth ever grown by 800% in one year? Probably not, but guess what? MINE HAS because I'm not shackled to the Slowlane wealth equation.

you've been domesticated to believe that these tools accelerate wealth. Mutual funds, stocks, bonds, 401(k)s, dollar cost averaging, and compound interest are perfunctory stratagem for wealth acceleration in the Slowlane. Unfortunately, without control or leverage, they're impotent wealth accelerators. Buy-and-Hold

to trade your time away is to trade your wealth away.

you don't want millions to accompany your cane, you want it to accompany your youth.

Anything that steals time and doesn't have the power to free time is a liability.

time is the liability and not the asset.

Slowlane wealth is improbable due to Uncontrollable Limited Leverage

Intrinsic value is the value of your time set by the marketplace and is measured in units of time, either hourly or yearly.

In the Slowlane, intrinsic value (regardless of its time measurement) is numerically inhibited because there are only 24 hours in the day (for the hourly worker),and the average lifespan is 74 years (for the salaried worker).

Wealth cannot be accelerated when pegged to mathematics based on time.

Time is your primordial fuel and it should not be traded for money.

Your time should not be an expendable resource for wealth because wealth itself is composed of time.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. ~ Albert Einstein

The cost of the MBA is $44,000 and 800 hours. Steve justifies this twofold expense (time and money) because he anticipates his intrinsic value to rise. Upon completion, Steve expects to be worth more to his company and worth more in the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, he still trades his time for money-just at a higher rate, yet still uncontrolled and unleveraged.

Whether consciously or not, the Slowlaner believes that elevating intrinsic value can create wealth.

If an education entombs you under a mountain of debt and shackles you to a job for the rest of your life, is it really a good education?

If an MBA increases your salary by 15% but takes 15 years to pay, was it a good investment?

A degree isn't a prerequisite to Fastlane wealth.

people in the 18–24 age bracket spend nearly 30% of their monthly income on debt repayment. This is double from 20 years ago.

If you financed your advanced education with debt, the debt automatically becomes parasitic and traps you into forced job servitude, and that destroys freedom. While you might earn more, work is forced to stave off the debt. The debt is parasitic because it fails to free time and instead creates indentured time. Sadly, the parasitic debt is unforgiving and isn't sympathetic to the source. Whether you owe $35,000 for your awesome BMW or for student loans, debt steals freedom and forces indentured time.

Slowlaners attempt to manipulate intrinsic value by education.

Indentured time is time you spend earning a living. It is the opposite of free time.

Parasitic debt is debt that creates indentured time and forces work.

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody. ~ Adlai Stevenson

When it comes to gurus and financial advisers this is what you must do: leave class and request a refund because they're guilty of a Paradox of Practice.

In the game of money, money is the scorecard. If someone tells you how they “scored,” make sure they disclose their real method to wealth, not the illusion concealing the real culprit.

gurus are rarely rich because of their advice, but rich because they're successful Fastlaners who covertly hide their Paradox of Practice.

Is Suze rich because she followed her own advice like municipal bonds, dollar cost-averaging and 401(k)s? The probable hypocrisy-the Paradox of Practice-is that Suze's method of creating wealth doesn't appear to be the road she travels, nor teaches. Is Suze Fastlane rich because she leverages the Fastlane roadmap while she pitches you the Slowlane? Is she worth millions because she followed her own advice? Or because she sold millions of books? Is her wealth equation different from the one she teaches?

the rich use the markets for income and wealth preservation-not to create it!

Robert is a Fastlane success story. He created and built a brand worth millions. But the curious question is this: Which came first? The best-selling book or the Lamborghini? Is there a Paradox of Practice underneath? Did Robert have this status icon “pre-book” by leveraging his real estate teachings? Or did the Lamborghini arrive after selling millions of books? Robert has undoubtedly amassed a great deal of wealth selling books, games, and seminars. Is it possible you're being sold one wealth equation while the architect of the game uses another?

Gurus fill a market need and I don't deny it. However consider this: Are they being truthful about their paradox and their magic potion? Are they rich because of what they preach, OR what they sell?

Is the underlying mathematical equation which governs their teachings the same one that made them rich?

If the "do as I say" doesn't match the "do as I do", you should be suspicious.

They don't use the plan they sell!

Take advice from people with a proven, successful track record of their espoused discipline.

Many money gurus often suffer from a Paradox of Practice; they teach one wealth equation while getting rich in another. They're not rich from their own teachings.

I'd rather live in regret of failure than in regret of never trying. ~ MJ DeMarco

To assume that you will live a long, healthy life is arrogant. To assume that life won't throw you any curves is naive. For the Slowlane to prevail, it assumes life is predictable and forgiving.

The Slowlane HOPES you will live long enough to enjoy the fruits of your savings as you hit your late stage years. Remember, you will have millions when you retire at 65! Will you be healthy enough to enjoy it? Alive? If you can't work your job, you can't make money. If you can't work, what happens to this plan? Also, avoid other calamities; hope your job stress doesn't kill you and your family remains healthy.

The Slowlane begs you to settle and become a miser. Want to own an exotic car? Forget it. Want to live on a beach? Wishful thinking. If you cannot control your temptations of lifestyle improvement (a nicer home, a nicer car, a nicer meal out), the Slowlane becomes slower and reverses course.

The Slowlane is risky because its variables are uncontrollable and leverage is absent.

ULL really means “ULL” never get rich.

Income explosion and expense control created wealth.

The Slowlane's failure rate is near 70%.

If you win a million bucks (which after taxes is only $600,000), your lifestyle shouldn't change.

Playing the lottery is a symptom of the Sidewalk. So why would it shock anyone to discover that a newly crowned lottery winner goes broke just years later? Lottery winners assign “rich” to the word “millionaire,” so their fortune is fast spent on the icons of wealth, and soon thereafter, they're bankrupt.

Millionaire is middle class.

To live a lifestyle normally reserved for “millionaires,” you will have to amass far more than $1 million. Having $1 million doesn't entitle you to a lifestyle of the rich and famous. You need at least $10 million for that.

Slowlane millionaires have MBAs. Fastlane millionaires hire people with MBAs.

Slowlane millionaires work for their time. Fastlane millionaires have time working for them.

Slowlane millionaires have 401(k)s. Fastlane millionaires offer 401(k)s.

Slowlane millionaires use mutual funds and the stock market to get rich. Fastlane millionaires use them to stay rich.

Slowlane millionaires are cheap with money. Fastlane millionaires are cheap with time.

Slowlane millionaires use their house for net worth. Fastlane millionaires use their house for residency.

Exponential income growth and expense management creates wealth-not just by curtailing expenses.

$5 million is the new $1 million.

A millionaire cannot live a millionaire lifestyle without financial discipline.

The Fastlane is a business and lifestyle strategy characterized by Controllable Unlimited Leverage (CUL), hence creating an optimal environment for rapid wealth creation and extraordinary lifestyles.

Your own business, self-employment, and entrepreneurship are centrist to the Fastlane, much like a job is to the Slowlane.

I travel, I learned two new languages and how to play piano.

We created an awesome service and sold the crap out of it.

Debt is useful if it allows me to build and grow my system.

Time is the most important asset I have, far exceeding money.

The moment you stop learning is the moment you stop growing. Constant expansion of my knowledge and awareness is critical to my journey.

The teenager who builds a Web site that profits $70,000 month and later sells it for millions.

“Azur, you're short-sightedness and thirst for wealth have clouded your vision. You build your pyramid and I will build mine.”

Azur was destroyed. He spent years doing the heavy lifting while Chuma built a machine to do it for him.

He never finishes his pyramid promised to Pharaoh simply because he decides to do the heavy lifting himself when he should have focused on a system to do it for him.

The Fastlane is about building a better system, a better contraption, a better product, or a better “something” that will leverage your work. In the Slowlane, you are the source of heavy lifting, while in the Fastlane, you construct a system that does it for you.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Losing teams use losing playbooks. Play for a losing team and you're stuck using their losing playbook. To win, switch teams and use the winner's playbook.

When you reframe your thinking from majority thinking (consumer) to minority thinking (producer), you effectively switch teams and allegiances.

Reshape life's focus on producing, not consuming.

become a producer first and a consumer second.

Break free from consumption, switch sides, and reorient to the world as producer.

once you see the world from a producer perspective, your perception sharpens

the rich are a minority, and you want to be in that minority. It starts with a producer mindset.

I've never bought a product on late night television, because I'm on the same team.

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.

To Consume Richly, Produce Effectively

To consume richly, produce richly first.

Switch teams and reorient as a producer first, a consumer second. Make wealth attracted to you!

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.

Some businesses masquerade as jobs!

This book is a business system that has unlimited leverage in both time and money! First, it survives time and it is capable of earning income long after my original time investment. This book effectively transfers the act of income generation from me (the human asset) to the book (the business asset).

You see, when you unlock yourself from the handcuffs of time imposed by the Slowlane roadmap, you assign income to a system that leverages unlimited mathematics, and fast wealth becomes possible.

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.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. ~ TS Eliot

Wealth = Net Profit + Asset Value

Net Profit = (Units Sold) X (Unit Profit)

Raise Units Sold by Increasing Conversion Ratio

A 1% increase from 12% to 13% would give me an instant raise of about $480 per day. That's $14,400 per month. If I redesign the Web site, hit a home run and get conversion to 15%, now I've expanded my income to over $43,000 PER MONTH.

Raise Units Sold by Increasing Web Traffic

To raise profit, I can increase traffic. If I increase Web users to my Web site from 12,000 to 15,000 and conversion stays at 12%, my daily income rises by $1,440 per day, or $43,200 per month! Not likely? It happened! On some days I would have traffic spikes where over 20,000 users would visit.

If I detect a weakness in supply for my service or improve value, I can raise prices and increase my unit profit. If my unit profit moves from $4 to $4.50,I raise my income to $10,800 per day from $8,000. That translates to an additional $84,000 per month!

Raise Unit Profit

I remember the time when I introduced a new service that cost me nothing and I sent out an email to my advertisers outlining the program. Within minutes, I made a few thousand dollars in reoccurring yearly income. My invested time was negligible and the results were accumulative.

When I make tiny, incremental changes in my strategy, I explode my income.

When your wealth variables have high leverage, so does your income potential-or would you rather stick with the ceiling of 24 hours native to intrinsic value?

Retarded numbers retard wealth!

Appreciable and controllable assets.

Fastlaners buy and sell appreciating assets: businesses, brands, cash flows, notes, intellectual property, licenses, inventions, patents, and real estate.

the power of “Asset Value” lies in your ability to control the variable in a virtually limitless fashion.

Asset Value = (Net Profit) X (Industry Multiplier)

Your wealth acceleration options if you stay as an employed engineer: Raise your intrinsic value and HOPE the boss gives you a pay raise. HOPE the company doesn't lay you off, so you can continue receiving your income. Save 10% of your paycheck in a mutual fund and HOPE for an 8% return for the next 40 years.

In the Fastlane, your Wealth Accelerator is based on creating or buying appreciative assets, adding value and manipulating the variables, and then selling.

John Twitnuts creates a social networking Web site that goes viral. Soon millions of people are using his service and John finds himself entertaining buyout offers and venture capital investments. Despite having no revenue and no profit, John has built an asset that has value to the marketplace. He receives a $640 million offer for his service from the Web's leading search engine. John declines, arguing that his business will be worth more money once he starts generating revenue. While this is true, it is a gamble. After 18 months, John's social networking service falls out of vogue, proving that the service was nothing more than a fad. The company becomes a bad party joke. In search of glowing valuations on a declining property, John no longer receives investor or buyer interest. He realizes too late that he should have taken the $640 million and experienced a liquidation event. He eventually sells the company at a “fire-sale” price of $2.5 million to a private equity firm. His poor timing cost him more than $600 million.

Fastlaners accelerate wealth by building cash-flowing assets that can be sold in the marketplace to realize gains. Their wealth equation has controllable, unlimited leverage.

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.

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.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful, lest you let other people spend it for you. ~ Carl Sandburg

When your wealth is predicated on factors that you cannot control and that are implicitly limited, you aren't going to make fast progress.

Money grows on trees if you own a money tree. And, you can own one if you know how and where to get the seeds.

Money trees create passive income streams BEFORE you “officially” retire.

Rental Systems Computer/Software Systems Content Systems Distribution Systems Human Resource Systems

Real estate is one “rental system.” I consider real estate money trees as Fastlane 1.0 or Wealth 1.0. It is the old way and still very much a road to wealth.

Leases, royalty payments, and licensing are other forms of “rental systems” that can produce reoccurring monthly income.

if you invent and patent a product process and license it to other companies, you again earn income from the licensing fee.

Software, when tapped into potent distribution, can be replicated to millions. It scales without significant degradation to passivity.

A distribution system is any structure or organization designed to move products to the masses. Distribution systems can be hybrids with the other seedlings, such as content and computer systems.

When inventing any product, the invention is always half the battle. Distribution is the other. The greatest product in the world goes unused if it isn't leveraged into the proper distribution system-either one that exists, or one that you create.

To make this idea a successful business, it would have required at least two-dozen people on payroll at all times. That stopped me cold and I didn't pursue it further. I wasn't willing to risk trading passivity for a human resource system that is unpredictable and difficult to manage.

To divorce yourself from the Slowlane's transactional relationship of “time for money,” you need to become a producer, specifically, a business owner.

If you have a passive income that exceeds all your needs and lifestyle expenses including taxes, you're retired.

Retirement can happen at any age.

A Fastlane objective is to create a business system that survives time, exclusive of your time.

The 5 money-tree seedlings are rental systems, computer systems, content systems, distribution systems, and human-resource systems.

The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender. ~ Proverbs 22:7 (NIV)

How is money passive? If you have a lot of money, you're given the gate key to switch teams from consumer to producer. Specifically, you move from borrower to lender. You move from employee to employer. You move from customer to owner. In other words, people pay you to use YOUR MONEY in the form of interest or ownership.

I'm a lender, and when you have a lot of money to lend, you live free because passive income arrives every month.

If you had $10 million and lent it at a mere 5% interest, you'd enjoy a passive income of $41,666 every single month. At 8% your monthly income would be $66,666 per month-fully passive.

So how does all of this become a reality? I created a passive income stream via my Internet businesses (a business money tree seedling), which funded my passive income system from lending.

While my Internet business was 85% passive (yes, I had to work several hours per week), my lending passivity is 99.5%. I do virtually nothing and the checks arrive. Instead of trading my time for dollars, I invested my time into an autonomous system simultaneously capable of passivity and capable of funding my money system.

Compound interest pays my bills. It's my tool. It's my passive income source. Yet, compound interest is not responsible for my wealth. This is critical. Fastlaners aren't using compound interest to build wealth, because it's not in their wealth equation. The heavy lifting of wealth creation is left to their Fastlane business.

When a rich politician or public figure comes forth and discloses his finances, notice the common themes. The source of their wealth comes from their business interests, while their liquid cash reserves are tied into fixed-income securities like municipal bonds, treasuries, and other highly liquid and safe investments.

The rich aren't using the markets to create wealth; they're increasing their existing wealth with leveraged business assets.

Remember, that 25-year-old multimillionaire who got rich investing in mutual funds is a fairy tale. The millionaires are the guys running the funds! They're the producers!

To actuate compound interest's power, start at the shore, with a large number that can be leveraged. Ten percent interest on $10 million is $1 million a year-$83,333 every single month. Exploit compound interest at its crest, not a million miles out to sea.

the rich aren't using compound interest to get wealthy; they're using it for income and liquidity.

A 5% tax-free yield on $10 million suddenly creates a $500,000 per year passive income. Like a tidal wave at the seashore, compound interest rears excruciating force when pitted against large sums of money. This is where money transforms into a fully passive income stream.

Fastlaners (the rich) don't use compound interest or the markets to get wealthy but to create income and preserve liquidity.

The rich leverage compound interest at its crest, applied against large sums of money.

Fastlaners eventually become net lenders.

Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. ~ Albert Einstein

I made a coordinated commitment to ACTION, a conscious choice, and then a commitment to that choice in the form of massive action.

It doesn't surprise me that these “attraction” books sell millions. The books that promise the easiest roads to wealth do well because, like sex, easiness sells.

Events of wealth sell. Process does not.

The Law of Effection states that the more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become.

Affect millions and make millions.

Impact millions.

Impact millions and make millions.

Who has benefited from your work, your assets, and your handiwork? What problems have you solved? What value are you to society?

The amount of money you have (or don't have) is a direct reflection on the amount of value you have provided (or not provided).

Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires.

Show me any self-made billionaire and I will show you a person who has touched the lives of many in scale or magnitude, directly or indirectly.

Retrace the source of millionaire money and you will find millions of something.

The more lives you impact, directly or indirectly, the more wealth you will attract.

They get paid millions because they entertain millions.

Make a giant impact a few times or make a small impact millions of times.

The closer you get to the source of large numbers, the closer you will get to wealth. To serve millions is to make millions.

Think big to earn big.

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.

To make millions you must serve millions in scale or a few in magnitude.

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

Is your gross pay that same as your net pay? It isn't and for some, it may be as much as 35% less. Additionally, pre-tax saving weapons such as 401(k)'s and IRA's severely limit your contributions to infantile amounts where creating wealth on a pre-tax basis in a job becomes organizationally penal.

If your primary income source comes from a job, your ability to pay yourself first is paralyzed because the governments are paid first! For “pay yourself first” to be legitimate, you truly need to pay yourself first in infinite amounts and the government last. You must own your vehicle.

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.

The corporation serves as the Fastlane frame because it offers the immediate tax benefit of “pay yourself first” versus “pay yourself last.”

When you own a corporation, net profits are reduced by expenses. The remaining profit is taxed, and those taxes are paid to the government.

When you own a corporation, the government is paid four times a year, once every quarter through estimated taxes. If you have a payroll, taxes are paid each time you pay your employees. I pay myself first 365 times a year while the government is paid four times a year.

The C corporation is a business structure that survives time and can be easily transferred. Corporate profits are taxed at corporate income tax rates, with net income distributed to shareholders.

“income splitting.” The strategy is to partition the business's income to both the owner and the business, effectively lowering the tax bracket of the two, versus a large income for just one.

An LLC operates just a like a corporation with the benefits of a partnership or a sole proprietorship. LLC profit passes through to its owners, called members, and is reflected on their personal income tax. LLCs are also considered “pass-through” entities because profit passes directly to the owners.

For partnerships, the LLC or the S corp is the recommended structure in lieu of a general partnership, which, again, does not offer liability protection.

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.

What is your exit strategy? Go public? Sell to private investors?

What is your growth strategy?

Do you plan to hire employees?

Do you plan on earning profits fast? Or not for a while?

“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.

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

I refused because I wanted to fix problems, not mask symptoms.

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.

If you aren't where you want to be, the problem is your choices. Your circumstances are the symptoms of those choices.

Fastlane success isn't one choice. It's hundreds. And when you line a string of choices together, they create your process, and your process will create your lifestyle.

The fabric of your life is sewn by the cumulative consequences of your choices-millions of them-that you set into motion.

If you're dissatisfied with life, your choices take full responsibility.

Blame yourself and the choices you've made.

you are as you have chosen.

reading on the train, on a plane, on the toilet in a run-down apartment, or on a beach in the Caribbean, you've chosen. I didn't force you to pick up this book and read it. You chose to. Yes, you are exactly where you decide to be. And if that's unhappiness, you need to start making better choices.

Why do I hate the Slowlane? Because it denies choice and gives it to someone else-the company, the boss, the stock market, the economy, and a whole host of others.

People don't choose to be poor. They make poor decisions that slowly assemble into a poorness puzzle.

The choice to watch TV or read a book.

Treasonous choices are actions that do irreparable harm to your life, your dreams, and your goals.

What's Chosen Today, Impacts Forever

Our choices have consequences that transcend decades.

A bad choice can set your trajectory off by only one degree today, but over years the error is magnified.

When your choices are extrapolated throughout the years, the divergence widens.

Choices have this type of divergence over time and it's called “impact differential.”

Recognize that every day you make decisions that will ripple through the years. Question is, will your choice ripple to happiness and wealth? Or depression and poverty?

impact differential!

Your choices have significant trajectory into the future, and the younger you are, the more horsepower they exude. Unfortunately, horsepower fades with age.

When an asteroid is millions of miles out in space (representing your youthful choices) a simple one-degree change in trajectory will save the Earth from destruction. This is the power of horsepower. For us older folks, the asteroid is closer to Earth (and closer to our death), which weakens the potency of our choices.

When you are under 25 you have maximum horsepower and your choices discharge an incredible amount of firepower. A simple choice I made more than 20 years ago is still felt today.

If you reflect on your choices, you make them in an instant, yet their consequences transcend a lifetime, especially ones made early in life.

Your life's choices are like a mature oak tree with millions of branches. The branches symbolize the consequences of your choices. Near the trunk of the tree, the branches are thick, reflecting the decisions you've made early in life, while the top branches are thin, symbolizing decisions near the end of your life.

The smallest choices made in your daily life create habits and lifestyle that forms process-they are the ones that can make the biggest impact. You can't decide to “go Fastlane” because that itself is just an event. A Fastlane process is hundreds of choices.

Whatever you decide today impacts tomorrow, weeks, months, years, decades, and yes, generations.

If you're younger than 30, your choices are at peak horsepower because they are growing the thick branches of your choice tree. Time to put the pedal to the metal!

The leading cause of poorness is poor 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.

Your choices have significant horsepower, or trajectory into the future.

Treasonous choices forever impact your life negatively.

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.

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

This seemingly innocent choice of perception has the excruciating horsepower of treason. It is a crippler of dreams. The teen's choice of perception was poor, and because of it, it would forever lead him to mediocre results.

Choices of perception serve as the impetus to choices of action.

The difference between the teen at the gas station and me was this: When I witnessed my first Lamborghini as a kid, I thought, “Some day, I'm gonna own one of those!” My choice of perception was strong and further manifested into choices of action that reflected that perception.

If you believe and perceive a certain idea, you are likely to act in accordance with that belief.

The first step in making better choices starts with your choice of perception, because your actions evolve from those perceptions.

If you lose your job, you can frame it as a negative or a positive. When you're caught speeding, you can be angry or thankful. The choice of perception and its choices start right between your ears and drive themselves into choices of action.

I remember the day when I thought $10,000 was a lot of money. It was perception and not reality. Earning $1 million in one month is possible if you make the right choices and drive the right Fastlane roads. This perception leads to better choices of action.

You can expose your mindset by examining the words in your language and your thoughts.

Altering your words and thought perceptions are akin to wiping your windshield clean and seeing beyond your own sphere of sight.

If your world is canvassed with words like “never” and “can't,” guess what? It's true-you can't and you never will!

Good choices of perception translate into good choices of action.

Believe that old age is not a prerequisite to wealth. Believe that a job is just as risky as a business.

Believe that you can be retired just a few years from today.

I never found that 19-year-old who got rich piling money into mutual funds. However, I did find 24-year-old millionaire inventors, business founders, authors, and Web site owners.

If you want extraordinary results, you're going to need extraordinary thinking.

Weighted Average Decision Matrix (WADM)

Worse Case Consequence Analysis (WCCA)

The first decision tool is Worst Case Consequence Analysis (WCCA), which 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?

Is this an acceptable risk? I immediately reasoned HELL NO. The 10% or the 1%-I reasoned the risk was too great and that risk had outcomes that could change my life FOREVER. I denied the woman's advances and hid my lust in favor of a better choice.

Sure, I would have enjoyed a quick romp of fun, but what about afterward? Would I be put in a position of an unplanned pregnancy with a woman I didn't know? Would I be condemned with a disease that would jeopardize my health and limit my search for a future partner? The potential consequences of this action had profound treasonous trajectories that I avoided.

today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

If you're stuck in the past, you're not looking ahead. If you're not looking ahead, you can't hit the mark of your future.

The universe doesn't care about your past. It is blind to it.

Your past never equals your future unless you allow it.

Think about a coin flip. No matter how many times it's flipped, the next flip is always random. Probability cannot be attached to a future flip based on the past.

When I reflect on my own failures, I let them serve me to effect future change. It's a part of the responsibility/accountability process.

While the consequences of our choices can't be manipulated, you can manipulate your memories to serve you.

If your past defines your existence, it will be impossible for you to become the person you need to become in the future.

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.

Your past can be accelerative or treasonous. You choose the classification.

The universe has no memory, only you do.

If your eyes are transfixed to the past, you can't become the person you need to become in the future.

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

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.

We must not hear the naysayers, because they have been conditioned by society.

You can't worry about deviating from social norms, because the norm is to be two paychecks from broke.

If you want to push beyond average results produced by average people, you'll need to adopt an uncommon approach that doesn't fall in the favor of “everyone.”

The more uncanny and exceptional you strive to be, the more you need to fight through social indoctrination.

Extraordinary wealth will require you to have extraordinary beliefs.

After graduating from college, I was expected to find a good job. I didn't and instead dove into entrepreneurial ventures.

You have to break free of society's gravitational force and their expectations.

When you spout excitement over actions or ideas, bloviators react with doubt and disbelief and use conditioned talking points such as, “Oh that won't work,” “Someone is already doing it,” and “Why bother?”

To be unlike “everyone” (who isn't rich), you (who will be rich) require a strong defense; otherwise, their toxicity infects your mindset.

Negative friends, family, or coworkers are dark clouds. Defend yourself or suffer the consequence of slow assimilation to mediocrity.

If your environment puts a stiff headwind in your face, you must take active steps to remove yourself from the headwind.

Join entrepreneur clubs, attend networking events, ally yourself with like-minders, get yourself around people who subscribe to a Fastlane, anything is-possible mindset, and decide who you want on your team of warriors.

Read books and autobiographies of those who have the kind of success you want.

Reflect on your environment and your relationships, and recognize the headwinds. Then choose accelerative action: Can these headwinds be removed, ignored, or managed? Unlike natural wind, you are the arbiter of your headwinds. Success follows those who break the headwind and put it at their back.

Significant Other or Significant Distraction?

By talking with other aspiring entrepreneurs, I've learned that significant others (husbands, wives, fiancés, girlfriends, boyfriends) can be some of the biggest headwinds out there.

Unwilling passengers add weight, distract, and sometimes are expensive to remove.

Traveling down the road less traveled is already difficult. Why compound the journey by weighing down the car with someone who doesn't share your destination?

The natural gravity of society is not to be exceptional, but average.

Toxic relationships drain energy and detract from your goals to be extraordinary.

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

Know anyone who would stand in line for hours just to get something free? Are you one of them? These stories are common, and yet my reaction is the same: What the hell is wrong with people? I'll tell you: These people value their time at zero. It's free. Like the air we breathe, they're convinced that time is abundant and in endless supply. They live as if they were immortal. They are certain that time, the fuel of their life, never runs empty.

Value your time poorly and you will be poor.

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.

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

Time is the greatest asset you own, not money, not the 1969 restored Mustang, not grandpa's old coin collection. Time.

You Were Born Rich and Will Die Broke

Time is the great equalizer. You were born with a full tank of gas. There are no refilling stations, and your one fill-up occurred the moment you took your first breath. Time can't be created outside of your mortal limits.

The reality is that time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.

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.

“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.

the irony of your free time is it isn't FREE; it's bought and paid for by your indentured time.

Indentured time becomes the ransom of your free time.

Any debt that forces you to work is reclassified from free time and shifts it to indentured time.

Everything we buy hasn't one cost, but two: The actual dollar cost The free time transformed into indentured time.

While some choose servitude behind iron bars, others choose servitude behind velvet walls. Both are the same.

Will this purchase TAKE FREEDOM? Will I own this or will it own me?

The inconvenient saver gladly wastes time to save money.

inconvenience is no match for saving a few bucks an hour.

Fastlaners are frugal with time, while Slowlaners are frugal with money.

Time is king.

Fastlaners regard time as the king of all assets.

Your lifespan is made up of both free time and indentured time.

Indentured time is time you spend to earn money. Free time is spent as you please.

Free time is bought and paid for by indentured 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.

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

What you know today is not enough to get you where you need to be tomorrow. You must constantly reinvent yourself, and reinvention is education.

Graduation Is Not the End; It Is the Beginning

Your most effective earning years happen AFTER graduation, so wouldn't it be smart to continue the educational process long after formal schooling?

To cease learning at graduation is wealth suicide.

Education, your oil, is a critical component to your wealth road trip. When you continually inject yourself with new education, new skills, and new competencies, new roads open and things run smoothly. The right education has incredible horsepower.

Fastlane education is secured by methods that do not produce parasitic debt or conformity.

The purpose of education within the Fastlane is to amplify the power of the money tree and the business system. You're not a cog in the wheel; you learn to build the wheel.

his purpose was not intrinsic value elevation, but expansion of his knowledge to facilitate a Fastlane system. I voted yes.

continued education must not come laden with conformity or parasitic debt, but must facilitate your Fastlane system.

Make the real world your university.

You learn from engagement, from doing, and from getting out and taking repeated action, more so than from any book or professor.

I graduated from college with two business degrees, marketing and finance. Neither of them was related to computer science. I graduated with no computer programming experience. Yet I made my millions on the Internet.

I educated myself. I read books. I hit the library. I spent hours on the Web and read articles, tutorials, wikis. I sought and consumed knowledge.

My religious pursuit of knowledge kept me efficient in an ever-changing world and primed me for Fastlane opportunities.

Education didn't end with graduation, it started.

my self-taught education was a twin-turbo acceleration into the Fastlane; my skills didn't come loaded with parasitic debt or conformity.

Walk into your local bookstore and inhale. Smell that? That's the smell of infinite knowledge. Walk into your local library and look around. Amazing. Wall-to-wall books, free for the taking. Imagine if you could digest every book, every paragraph, and every sentence. Would “I don't know” be a detriment to your success?

education is freely available, yet most choose not to take it.

Education is free for your consumption. Infinite knowledge is at your fingertips and the only thing preventing you from getting it is you.

A committed Fastlaner has his nose in a book weekly.

You have the innate power to become an expert at anything not requiring physical talent.

The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich.

Books possess the greatest return for your educational dollar. Buy them, borrow them, or steal them. Just read them.

Internet forums: Find like-minded congregations and learn from those who have succeeded. Find tailwinds!

The best investment you can make is in yourself.

be willing to pay for your education now, or be prepared to pay a much bigger price for your lack of education later.

Listen to audio books or financial news radio while stuck in traffic. Traffic nuisances transformed to education.

Absorb books, podcasts, and magazines while exercising at the gym. In between sets, on the treadmill, or on the stationary bike, exercise is transformed to education.

Bring something to read with you when you anticipate a painful wait: Airports, doctor's offices, and your state's brutal motor vehicle department. Don't sit there and twiddle your thumbs-learn!

Never throne without reading something of educational value. Extend your “sit time” (even after you finish) with the intent of learning something new, every single day. Toilet University is the best place to change your oil, since it occurs daily and the time expenditure cannot be avoided. This means the return on your time investment is infinite! Toilet time transformed to education.

While I waited for passengers, pizzas, and flower orders, I read. I didn't sit around playing pocket-poker; no, I read. If you can exploit dead time during your job, you are getting paid to learn. Dead-end jobs transformed to education.

Think about the time you already use. How many hours do you waste in the trivialities of life? This time doesn't need to be lost, wasted time. This time is ripe for Fastlane oil changes.

To start your oil recharge, choose a topic that interests you or an area in your life that needs improvement. Not good at sales or writing? Get to the library and start reading.

Set a goal to read at least 12 books per year, or one per month. If you are aggressive like me, you'll read a book every week. I can't stress enough that the more knowledge you consume, the more torque you create on the Fastlane road trip.

those well-suited presenters? They suffer the typical Paradox of Practice: rich from public speaking to millions but not rich from what they teach.

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.

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.

Interest works on your business an hour a day Monday through Friday; commitment works on your business seven days a week whenever time permits.

Interest reads a book; commitment applies the book 50 times. Interest wants to start a business; commitment files LLC paperwork.

Interest leases an expensive car; commitment rides a bike and puts the money into your system.

Interest is looking rich; commitment is planning to be rich.

Interest is quitting after the third failure; commitment is continuing after the hundredth.

Most people aren't willing, and it separates the winners from the losers.

The idea of living in the rat race for 50 years has to be more painful than the idea of working your ass off to escape it.

The Fastlaner trades short-term comforts with the foreknowledge that long-term extraordinary comfort is to be gained.

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.

Wealth is a devious entity, and its elusiveness weeds out the weak.

Your journey will follow a predictable path of excitement, 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.

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.

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.

Take calculated risks. Do so and things happen. You meet new people. New opportunities arise. Feedback pours in. “Lucky breaks” converge into your life. The act of doing does marvelous things.

When you resist societal headwinds, you will sweat!

Failure is imminent. I learned how to code computers by trial-and-failure. I'd fail a code block hundreds of times before I found the right way to do something.

Fear of failure is normal, yet failure creates experience and experience breeds wisdom.

If you want to hit home runs, you've got to get up to the plate and swing.

When you take intelligent risks and avoid the moronic ones, you amplify your wealth trajectory through time.

Minimize moronic risk and take advantage of intelligent risk.

Make someday today.

There is never a perfect time. Someday is today. Today is now.

Opportunity Doesn't Care About Timing

Opportunity drives through your neighborhood frequently, and when it does, you have to grab that bitch. Evaluate the risk and take action.

Not in my time, but “opportunity's time,” and someday became today.

Many of the world's successful entrepreneurs started businesses in college. You know their companies: Microsoft, Dell, FedEx, and Facebook. Their founders seized opportunity outside of their timing and chose to take an intelligent risk.

To live unlike everyone else, you have to do what everyone else won't.

Moronic risks have unlimited downside (long term) and limited upside (short term).

Intelligent risks have unlimited upside (long term) and limited downside (short term.)

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

The Law of Effection says to make millions you must impact 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.

Effection, because Effection is the gatekeeper to wealth.

The Commandment of Need The Commandment of Entry The Commandment of Control The Commandment of Scale The Commandment of Time

The best roads and the purest Fastlanes satisfy the Five Fastlane Commandments: Need, Entry, Control, Scale, and Time.

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.

When you build a business on a flawed foundation, it will fail. Sand foundations crumble houses. 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.

Consumers are selfish. They demand to know is “what's in it for me!” To succeed as a producer, surrender your own selfishness and address the selfishness of others.

Stop Chasing Money-Chase Needs

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.

Entrepreneurs fail because they create businesses based on selfish premises, and selfish premises don't yield profitable businesses; they lead directly into the 90% failure wastebasket.

Give first, take second.

Money chasers are consumers who haven't quite made the transition to producer. They want to be producers, but they selfishly think like consumers.

To Attract Money Is to Forget About Money

The amount of money in your life is merely a reflection to the amount of value you have given to others.

Solve needs massively and money massively attracts.

One of the many destinations of the Fastlane is to remove the confirmation of money from your “do what you love” activity. Fastlane success means I could play basketball seven days a week. I can play video games all day. I don't need to get paid to “do what I love” because I can now do it for FREE.

your love becomes vulnerable to contamination when you do it for money. If you are forced to do anything, even something you purport to love, in exchange for a paycheck, that love is put in danger.

I once had a friend who created fantastic paintings as a hobby. When I asked her why she doesn't paint full time for a living, her answer was simple: I paint when I am impassioned to paint. The few times when she painted for money, it stunted her artistic creativity because a different force fueled the motivation-money, not emotion from the moment.

What is your WHY? Why are you doing this? Why go Fastlane? Whom do you want to prove wrong? My “WHYS” read like this: “I want to pay off my mother's mortgage.” “I want to wake up without an alarm clock.” “I want to write a book without the pressure of money.” “I want a big house on a mountainside with a pool.” “I want a Lamborghini.” “I want to make a difference.” “I want to prove him wrong.”

Passion beats “do what you love,” because passion fuels motivation for something greater than yourself and is generalized.

Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane action.

When I was in startup mode with my company, I worked long hours. Was I suffering the toil of work? No. I enjoyed it, because I had my “whys” and I was moving toward them.

I love to see the dreams of others become reality.

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.

Help one million people and you will be a millionaire.

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.

“Doing what you love” for money can endanger your love.

The right road for you is one that will converge with your dreams.

“Doing what you love” usually leads to the violation of the Commandment of Need.

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

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.

If anyone can start a business in one day or less doing what you do, you probably are violating the Commandment of Entry and tough odds are ahead.

when I started my Internet business I had roughly 12 competitors. Could I be exceptional among 12? Absolutely.

Process, Not an Event

A road full of traffic is a road full of everyone. If everyone is doing it, I won't be doing it. I'll exit the road, and you should too. Why? Because everyone isn't wealthy.

When the frenzy is buying, you should be selling. When the frenzy is selling, you should be buying or staying pat.

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.

If everyone were wealthy, “everybody is doing it” would work. And if everyone is wealthy, then no one is wealthy.

There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence on one's self. ~ John Gay

Drivers offer employment; they don't get employed.

Adsense is an advertiser network that online content publishers leverage to earn income from their Web sites' traffic. There are affiliates, bloggers, and publishers who earn good money from using Google's AdSense program. Some content providers and bloggers earn six figures monthly. Arguably, this is big money, yet Google (the driver) makes the legendary money.

In any driver/hitchhiker relationship, the driver always makes more money than the hitchhiker and retains a critical component to Fastlane strategy: control.

If you can't change your product, are you the boss? If you can't change your price, are you the boss? If you can't influence marketing decisions, are you the boss?

Build pyramid organizations-don't join them. Think manufacture, not retail.

Think globally, not locally. Think to lead, not to follow. Think to innovate, not to copy.

Each fish doesn't act as a single unit. They act in unison as a collective. Unfortunately, most people can't see the danger of this analogy. They're just one fish immersed in a collective controlled by a force greater than themselves. And who is attracted to these schools of fish? The sharks.

Invest in Your Brand Only!

Not investing in my own brand was one of my most serious mistakes as a young entrepreneur.

The Fastlaner creates and invests in his own brand; the hitchhiker climbs aboard someone else's and hopes to piggyback a ride.

In business, to be a success you only have to be right once. ~ Mark Cuban

If you own a tanning salon, your habitat is local. If you own an upscale restaurant, your habitat is county/city. If you own an Internet company, your habitat is worldwide.

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.

if you don't have leverage in the Fastlane equation, you don't have a chance!

If “units sold” has a ceiling, you handcuff your ability to create leverage. Without leverage, you can't create wealth exponentially.

My favorite example is the guy who buys a popular sandwich franchise in his local neighborhood. This business violates the Commandment of Scale because the variables-units sold and unit profit-are implicitly limited. How many sandwiches can this guy humanly sell in one day? Fifty? A hundred? How many hours are in the day? Twenty-four? See the similarity?

The objective of units sold is to have an upper limit greater than 100.

Magnitude is naturally increased with price or cost.

The bigger your pool of play, the bigger your potential for wealth.

To gain access to Effection, you have to break the barrier of scale or magnitude in an entity you control.

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live only about a hundred years. ~ Thomas Edison

The Commandment of Time requires that your business detach from your time.

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.

Can this business be automated and systematized to operate while I'm absent?

How can I get this business to operate exclusive of my time?

The goal of the Fastlane is a disconnection of your time from income, even if that income isn't millions.

As a Fastlaner, your road should be traveled with the intention to make it automated.

Internet Innovation Intentional Iteration

Content-based models are online news magazines and blogs that disseminate information to a particular niche or industry. These services provide content for free consumption and sell advertising to parties who want to reach those eyeballs.

E-commerce is the act of selling goods, services, and information over the Internet.

E-books are the most popular form of information distribution on the Internet.

Invent a product, service, or piece of information, manufacture it, and then distribute it.

Innovation involves two acts: 1) Manufacture and 2) Distribution.

Take an underexposed product, make it your own, and reintroduce it to the world. Take something unconventional and make it conventional.

Take something old and stale and make it better.

Intentional iteration is the Fastlaner's response to limited scale.

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.

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

If you can't see the opportunities that surround you every day, you haven't tuned your Fastlane frequency to them.

Many entrepreneurs misinterpret opportunity because they associate opportunity with breakthrough, legendary ideas. They seek virgin ideas, perfect and new; ones that would be unveiled to the world in a grandiose affair. Rarely does that happen.

Opportunity is rarely about some blockbuster breakthrough like the light bulb or the car, but as simple as an unmet need, or a need not met adequately.

Opportunity is a solution to an inconvenience. Opportunity is simplification. Opportunity is a feeling. Opportunity is comfort. Opportunity is better service. Opportunity is fixing pain. Opportunity is putting weak companies out of business.

You've got a great idea, but someone is already doing it? So what. Do it better.

Successful businesses rarely evolve from some legendary idea. Nope, successful entrepreneurs take existing concepts and make them better.

Forget the Big Idea; Go for Better

You don't need an idea that has never been done before. Old ideas suffice; just take it and do it better! Execute like no one has!

Skip the big idea and go for the big execution.

Not a day goes by when I don't spot a need that can be exploited for Fastlane opportunity. My mind is tuned because I see the terrain of opportunity through accustomed senses.

“I hate …” What do you hate? Solve the hate, and there's your open road. “I don't like …” What don't you like? Remove the dislike, and there's your open road. “This frustrates me …” What is frustrating? Remove the frustration, and there's your open road. “Why is this like this?” I don't know, why is it? Remove the “why,” and there's your open road. “Do I have to?” Do you? Remove the “have to.” There's your open road. “I wish there was …” What do you wish? If you wish, others wish too. Make wishes come true, and there's your open road. “I'm tired of …” What are you tired of? Fix someone's tiresomeness, and there's your open road. “This sucks . . .” What sucks? Remove or reduce suckage, and there's your open road.

Opportunity is dressed in predictable code words that illuminate its presence.

The opportunities of open roads come in easily painted language: Discomfort, distress, inconvenience, complaints, problems, and performance gaps.

Solve other people's problems and you will solve your own money problems!

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.”

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.

Quitting only happens when you give up on your dream.

The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. ~ Benjamin Mays

financial encumbrances

philanthropy. The end of the Fastlane road trip is to crown

You can't travel the world by swimming in the oceans. You have to pay your way, and if you think money is evil, you've already lost.

Many perfectly intelligent people lack rudimentary knowledge of basic financial concepts such as: Interest rates Taxable and non-taxable yields Amortization of mortgages The balancing of a check book Basic percentage calculations Calculating return on investment Why stocks rise and fall Why a guaranteed 15% return on a bank CD is screaming, “scam!” How stock options work, such as calls and puts Why insurance exists How a mutual fund works What bonds are and how they rise and fall Global currency

you have to familiarize yourself with financial instruments that fuel the money system. Do you know how to calculate simple interest? Return on investment? Do you know what happens to the price of a bond when interest rates go up? Can you figure out the difference between a tax-free yield and a taxable yield? These concepts harden your road to wealth. Financial illiterates can't manage money systems.

Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.

when you are financially illiterate, you are deaf, and when you are deaf, you can't hear the whistle.

Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.

success is never about the idea but about the execution.

Ideas Are Worthless; Execution Is Priceless

In the world of wealth, ideas are worthless yet treated like gold.

The owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.

Was my idea spectacular? No. It was an OK idea, but I executed better than the competition.

wealth dichotomy: Event versus process. Execution takes process: effort, sacrifice, discipline, and persistence. Ideas are just events.

Execution divides winners and losers from their ideas.

In business, execution is process. Ideas are events.

He who thinks the idea owns nothing. He who executes the idea owns everything.

Others share your blockbuster idea.

The ultimate judge-and-jury of ideas is the world and the marketplaces that serve them.

If the world likes your offer, they vote by giving you their time, their thoughts, or their money.

You see, the world tells you which direction you should be going at all times. Heed the signs. How do you get the world to tell you? Put your executed ideas and concepts out into the world and let it tell you.

Business plans are useless until they are married to execution.

the world doesn't give two pence about your 150-page PowerPoint business plan.

I didn't get entangled in the intricacies and paralysis of planning, which is no substitute for execution.

Figure out what needs figuring and just go do it. The world will do its job and tell you the directions to travel.

The best business plan in the world will always be a track record of execution.

The value is not the plan, but the person giving it and his track record of execution.

If you don't have a track record of execution, the business plan is a worthless piece of Kinkos-bound pulp.

Get Funded with Execution, not with Business Plans

instead of an idea on paper, I had a tangible concept that reflected execution.

If you want investors, get out and execute! Create a prototype! Create a brand! Create a track record that others can see or touch! Dive into process. When you have a physical manifestation of an idea, investors will open their wallets.

Angels to private equity never invest in business plans-they invest in people with track records of execution.

if you really want to get funding for your business, get out and make your idea tangible. Give investors something they can see, touch, and feel. Give investors a glimpse of your execution, because that is what creates speed on the Fastlane.

As soon as the world interacts with your ideas, your business plan is invalidated.

Business plans are useless because they are ideas on steroids.

The marketplace will steer you into directions that were previously unplanned for.

The best business plan in the world is a track record of execution-it legitimizes the business plan.

If you want your business to get funded, take action and create something that reflects tangible execution.

Investors are more likely to invest in something tangible and real; not ideas dissected ad nauseam on paper.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful. ~ Jeff Bezos

Complaints are a beautiful thing. They represent free feedback and expose unmet needs in your business.

Complaints are the world's whispers hinting the direction you should be moving.

If I couldn't manage the complaints, I could manage the expectations.

Complaints of void are when your customer continually requests something and you simply don't have it. Complaints of void are extremely valuable, as they expose unmet needs.

Complaints of void are goldmines of opportunity. People freely tell you exactly what they want and you don't have to pay for it! Unmet needs are served up on a silver platter.

“I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

As a business owner you must remember that, while you don't have a boss, the person who pays your mortgage is your customer and they always should be heard-but sometimes ignored.

Leverage Free Human Resource Systems

Customer service that SUCS, service that violates your customer's low-expectation profile positively, turns customers into lifelong clients, and disciples of your business.

Your customer service strategy will influence your company's growth. Satisfaction implies expectations being met. To create raving customers, you must exceed satisfaction.

after awhile, my advertiser acquisition cost disappeared because my advertisers did it for me … for FREE! When your clients love your business, they become disciples and advertise for you. They become unpaid human resource systems, evangelists who drop your name wherever necessary.

Violate customer's expectations. Create evangelists. Create human resource systems that will work for you, for free. Attract money.

Success in business comes from making your customer the boss and the No. 1 stakeholder to your business.

Look Big, Act Small

My other purpose for “looking big” was to beat my competition before they even started. When someone (or some company) wants to set up shop and compete with you, they investigate you first. They look at your Web site, see what you're doing and the prices you're charging, and decide if they want to invest money and time to enter the space.

Look big, but act small.

Complaints are valuable insights into your customers' minds.

Complaints of expectation expose operational problems in either your business, or in your marketing strategy.

Complaints of void expose unmet needs, raise the value of your product or service, and expose new revenue opportunities.

Great customer service is as simple as violating your customer's low expectation in the positive.

Satisfied customers can be human resource systems who promote your business for free.

Satisfied customers have a dual residual effect: Repeat business and new business via discipleship.

Looking big but acting small sets up customer service expectation violations in the positive.

Looking big can scare away potential competitors.

People are definitely a company's greatest asset. It doesn't make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps. ~ Mary Kay Ash

Partnerships are marriages. After the love affair and the lust wears off, they must survive on character, synergy, and complementary attributes.

You must make your trust an asset to be earned by others.

“Trust, but verify.”

Verify First, Trust Later

There is only one person you can blindly trust in this world, and that is YOU.

There is no place safe from liars, con artists, thieves, and crooks.

Today I trust no one but give everyone the opportunity to prove trust.

There are a lot of good people in this world, and they do outnumber the bad by a wide margin. It just takes a mild effort to find them and keep them in your life.

Spectacular product features can't overcome poor service.

Your employees drive the public's perception of your company.

The failure was in the communication lines from management to employee. Not just one employee, but several. You can't be driving the ship all day. Your employees carry the water buckets, and if they aren't ordained in service, they hijack business and create liabilities.

Customer service philosophy is irrelevant if employees don't translate that philosophy into frontline action.

No amount of spectacular product features, such as great technology (snazzy Web sites) or great architecture (lavishly appointed hotels) can compensate for poor customer service.

Fanatical customer service-service that SUCS-can help compensate for shortcomings, but fanatical features cannot compensate for poor customer service, or poor human interaction.

Exponential business growth is fueled by fanatical customer service, and your frontline employees must share your vision.

A business partnership is as important as a marriage.

A good accountant and attorney will save you thousands, perhaps millions.

Accountants and attorneys have the keys to your castle; make sure you trust them fully because they have the power to right or wrong you.

Unmitigated trust exposes you to unmitigated risk.

Unverified trust can lead to uncontrollable consequences.

Fanatical customer service can overcome shortcomings, but fanatical features can't overcome poor customer service.

A market is never saturated with a good product ,but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one. ~ Henry Ford

Commoditization is a product or service that appears homogeneous among providers. For example, a service that has been heavily commoditized is air travel. Most people aren't loyal to any particular airline; they're loyal to the company with the best price.

If your product doesn't standout in the crowd, it doesn't stand a chance and you're forced into the strategy of “cutting prices to stand out from the crowd.”

When supply exceeds demand, prices must drop; suddenly, the product becomes commoditized.

If your product isn't someone's knight, standing out from the crowd and differentiating, it stands to be commoditized.

Forget about your competition 95% of the time. The other 5% should be used to exploit their weaknesses and differentiate your business.

On the rare occasions you peek in at your competition, do so for exploitation. Mine their weaknesses and differentiate your product. Uncover what you should be doing that they aren't. Find the need. Exploit their customer service gaffes. Is it impossible to receive good service? Do dissatisfied customers litter the Web with their displeasure?

If you are going to take your eye off the road and examine your competitors, expose their weaknesses. Exploited weakness is where brands are built: Differentiation is a defense to commoditization.

The only alternative to boorish me-too goods and services is differentiation, and that is accomplished by innovation and analyzing your competitor's weaknesses. Force innovation.

Commoditization occurs when you get into business based on a false premise-“I want to own a business” or “I know how to do this, so I'll start a business doing it.”

Use your competition to exploit their weaknesses.

Businesses survive. Brands thrive. A brand is the best defense to commoditization. When your business is in business just to make money and pay the bills for the month, you're playing checkers and being one-dimensional. People are loyal to brands and relationships, not corporations or businesses.

Brands don't have identity crises, businesses do.

Say “Apple,” and many images come to mind: creative, trendy, easy, and hip. When I think of PC, I think of blue screens, illegal operations, and “you must reboot your computer 17 times before this update takes effect.” One is a business. The other is a brand.

The first step at building a brand is to have a Unique Selling Proposition or a USP.

USP-less businesses offer nothing distinct, nothing unique, no benefit, no logical reason that someone should buy from them other than hope or circumstance wrapped around a cheap price.

Your USP is the anchor to your brand. What makes your company different from the rest? What sets your business apart? What will compel a customer to use you over someone else?

USPs are the building blocks to brands and can compensate for higher prices or even an inferior product!

“delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less-or it's free.” Domino's identified the need: Pizza delivery was a long ordeal. They solved it, branded it, and the rest is history.

Get into business for the right reason: to solve a problem or a need. That creates your first USP. If you are already in business, find the greatest benefit of your product, one that sets it apart from the competition. Do this with your customer in mind. Think about their needs and what they want.

The objective of a USP is to be unique when compared to the alternatives. This impregnates the consumer with a logical argument for choosing your company, because, without your company, they are forgoing the benefit.

USPs should use powerful action verbs that create desire and urgency.

The best USPs are short, clear, and powerful. Long phrases get skipped over.

Integrate Your USP into ALL Marketing Materials

Include your USP on all your public communications: Your trucks, vehicles, and buildings Your advertising and promotional materials Business cards, letterheads, signs, brochures, and flyers Your Web site and your email signature Your voice mail system, receptionist/sales scripts, etc.

Fraudulent USPs get exposed fast and create “human resource systems” ready to rick-roll your company.

you have to make your USP real. You must deliver on what you say.

You see, we all are marketers and some of us are marketers of an illusion. What this does is creates an abundance of noise and makes it harder for the real purveyors to be heard.

They say if you want to boil your passions, test drive the car of your dreams.

Interactivity increases response for anything. If you can taste it, feel it, or use it, you will be more likely to buy it.

Interaction is like hearing your name. It's your favorite. On Facebook, the most popular applications are “surveys” and “questionnaires” because people love narcissism.

The revolution of social media, blogs, and “Web 2.0” is founded on interaction. You just don't want to read an article; you want to comment on it! Your two cents must be heard!

Its been pulverized into flaccidity, so why the heck are you using it?

If you get someone's attention, half the battle is won. The other half is letting selfishness take over your audience and tailor your messages to self-interest. In other words, the good old “What's in it for me?” How about saving 15% or more on your car insurance?

It's ironic: To succeed a Fastlane we must forsake selfishness yet satisfy the selfishness of others.

People need to be told exactly what's in it for them. How will your product or service help them? What's the benefit? In marketing speak, it's called the “What's In It For Me?” (WIIFM) principle.

We must become problem solvers, and to identify our business as a savior to someone, we must translate features into benefits.

Does the fact you are the largest limousine company in Colorado solve my problem? It doesn't until you translate that feature into a benefit.

If you want to sell anything, translate features to benefits.

Switch places. Identify features. Identify advantages. Translate advantages into benefits.

What is their modus operandi?

For my Web service, here are just a few features I had: 1) Upload pictures 2) Target leads by vehicle, date, and service and 3) Schedule vehicles. While these features were great, it was my responsibility to translate them to benefits. What makes them so great? What advantages do they offer my client?

For my Web service, the feature of “upload pictures” translated to: “Quit wasting time with client meetings at garages. Upload photos of your fleet and show your clients your product!”

Each feature transcribed to a specific benefit that would compel my buyer to join. I didn't let them fill in the blanks; I filled in the blanks for them.

Price is a brand-builder because price implies value.

The more expensive your price, the higher its perceived value. The cheaper your price, the cheaper its perceived value.

Cleaning his basement, a man found an old dresser and decided to give it away. He moved the dresser to the street corner and placed a sign atop it: FREE. Shockingly, the dresser stood there all day, and for several days thereafter. This confused the man because the dresser, albeit old, was in decent shape and just needed a quick wood stain for perfection. The man decided a new strategy was warranted. He went to the street corner and replaced the “FREE” sign with “$50.” Not an hour later, the dresser was stolen.

I wasn't the cheapest, so why did I do well? My service had better value, and I kept my price correlated to that value. My leads were better targeted. I had better joint venture partners. I had great support. I was running a brand while my competitors were running businesses.

My artist friend, who painted the most exquisite, beautiful paintings, priced her work through her own limited price filter. She was a single mom, struggling to the pay the bills, living paycheck to paycheck. For her, $500 was an extraordinary amount, and because of that, she priced her works far below their true value. Her own corrupted vision of price distorted her earning power and degraded the perceived value of her work. I suggested a price increase. Take that $90 painting, make it $300, and see what happens. Sure enough, she sold just as much art at the higher price, because price implies value and defines brands.

How does a handbag sell for $4,000 when it probably costs them less than $100 to produce? Branding and marketing. Price is apart of the brand build.

Marketing and branding (the queen) is the most powerful tool in your Fastlane toolbox.

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 talk about themselves. If you can incorporate interaction into your campaigns, you will have better success.

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.

Don't allow your own perception of price direct your brand to mediocrity.

Price implicitly conveys value and worth.

money chasing versus need filling.

A scattered focus leads to scattered results.

When you segregate your effort among assets, you build weak assets. Weak assets don't do heavy lifting, and they don't build strong pyramids.

The richest people in the world got rich by focusing on one core purpose, not by diverting focus.

Focus on one thing and do it in the most excellent way. Some of the greatest tech entrepreneurs built impressive companies by 100% committed focus, not diverted attentions into other ventures.

After successful entrepreneurs hit the mother lode of wealth, then, and only then, do they divert into other ventures that deviate from their core business. In other words, their monogamy led to polygamy.

Weak assets do not accelerate wealth.

A weak business commitment commits you to weak assets.

Successful business monogamy can lead to successful business polygamy.

Your choices are made in a moment, but their consequences will transcend a lifetime. ~ MJ DeMarco

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.

luck is the residue of engagement.

Invest time into a business system that can transform indentured time into free time. Make decisions with time as a key decision factor.

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.

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.

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.

Behavior change begins with a reflection of your past choices and modifying them for the future

Become responsible, followed by accountable.

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.

Education begins at graduation. Pledge to never stop learning.

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.

Observe your thoughts and language, because they expose unmet needs, or needs met poorly.

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.

You can't explode your income by chasing money. Stop chasing money, because it eludes those who try.

Resist commoditization. Differentiate yourself from the competition. Get above the noise. Focus on one business and one business only.

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.

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.

Make a choice today that can change the course of your life forever.