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Name: The Millionaire Dropout
Rating: 4.2 (59 reviews)
Author: Vince Stanzione

Vince Stanzione

Fire Your Boss, Do What You Love, Reclaim Your Life!

4.2 (59 ratings)

25 mins

Table of Contents

The Millionaire Dropout
summarized in 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Tips to turn your life around.

Vince Stanzione knows a thing or two about the school of hard knocks. The son of an Italian immigrant who arrived in the UK without a penny to his name, he knew from the get-go that success was something he’d have to struggle for. Entrepreneurial to the core, he was cutting hair and overseeing the salon’s payroll by age 12.

Fast forward to the mid-80s, and Stanzione was making a killing trading equities at the height of the financial revolution unfolding in Thatcher’s London. Then came the 1987 crash, which wiped him out. Others might have thrown in the towel, but Stanzione dusted himself off and got back to business. Within a decade, he’d remade his fortune, and then some.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride for Stanzione. Along the way, he picked up some invaluable life lessons. First off, that persistence pays. Second, failure is part of your journey. Those core messages resonate throughout these blinks. If a near-bankrupt, non-academic and occasionally homeless social dropout like Stanzione can make it, so can you.

The key is to recognize that your future is in your hands – if you want success, you’d better be ready to get out there and fight for it. But you don’t have to go it alone: start putting the advice in this practical, hands-on self-help manual to use, and you’ll already be well on your way to a more fulfilling and successful life.

Read on to find out

how to make better decisions;
why mail order might just be the best business model in the world; and
how to make your money go further.

Start turning your life around by breaking out of your comfort zone.

Do you love your life the way it is right now? Do you earn more than you’ll ever need and feel fulfilled by your job? If your answers to these questions are “yes,” then congratulations – you can stop reading right now! But what if you sometimes wake up dreading work or struggle to stretch your paycheck to cover all your wants and needs? Well, welcome to the club. Like millions of others, you’re not living your best life. But that’s about to change.

Let’s get one thing clear from the get-go: turning your life around won’t be easy. Change is a long and occasionally arduous journey – but that can’t come as too much of a surprise. Whether it’s overeating, drinking too much, failing to save money or giving up on learning, most of us spend a good twenty or thirty years messing up our lives. Tidying that up takes time and effort. But here’s the silver lining: it can be done.

So where do you start? Well, as an old Chinese proverb has it, a journey of a million miles begins with one step. The first item on your travel itinerary is breaking out of your comfort zone. It’s the most familiar place in the world and includes everything that has become so routine you do it on autopilot: commuting, grinding out another day at the office, watching TV on the sofa in the evenings and sleeping for as long as possible before it all restarts the next morning.

The truth is that most people live in their comfort zones. They regard it as both acceptable and normal because they’ve given up on their old dreams. They’ve lost all hope of doing something dazzling and achieving fame and fortune – in other words, they’ve come to terms with the fact that their highest priority is simply getting by. It was this which moved Benjamin Franklin to remark that “most men die at 25, we just don’t bury them until they’re 70.”

Think of this as your wake-up call. Your time on earth is too precious to spend it simply existing. In the following blinks, we’ll be taking a closer look at how you can get out of your rut and start truly thriving. First, let’s get down to basics and ask the most important question of all: What do you actually want?

If you don’t know what you want in life, there’s little chance you’ll ever get it.

Ever heard the phrase “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”? It basically means that the loudest problems get the most attention.

People blame their unhappiness on all sorts of issues, but the real culprit is usually much less obvious: they’ve never sat down and defined what they actually want in life. It’s like going to a travel agency and saying you want to be sent somewhere nice where you’ll find a great job, a perfect partner and where you’ll be happy – a vague wish that’s pretty much impossible to fulfill.

Positive thinking and visualization can help you rewire your mind’s negative circuitry.

The human mind is a bit like a memory stick. When we’re born, it’s blank, but as we grow, we gradually fill it with new skills and ideas. Some of the files we add, however, contain negative and hurtful comments, from adults who told us we were too clumsy to play soccer or not clever enough to be good at math.

Those comments often end up creating negative feedback loops that hold us back later in life. But while the human brain doesn’t have a delete button, it can be rewired. Let’s see how you can record new, positive suggestions over those bad memories.

Making sound decisions and taking failure in your stride will guide you to success.

Life is all about making calls. Many of the things that happen to you – good and bad – can be traced back to past decisions. Chances are, a fair few of your choices still haunt you. But it’s not just hindsight that’s twenty-twenty – in fact, decision-making can be just as effective, as long as you apply the right techniques.

Take the so-called “Ben Franklin Method.” Say you’ve been offered a job in Germany, but you’re not sure whether to take it. Write down all the “pros” in one column, and all the “cons” in another. Give each factor – “better pay” versus “losing contact with old friends,” for example – a value from one to ten in terms of importance. All you have to do then is count up the numbers and see which side has the higher score.

The world of work is changing, and self-employment is an increasingly attractive option.

The American billionaire John Paul Getty was savvy about making money. His view? No one ever got rich working for someone else. In a sense, though, you’re already self-employed – the company you work for is a means to an end, and if you didn’t get paid, you’d stop showing up. That means that you’re working for yourself, but giving someone else most of the profits!

That’s a great reason to consider ditching the nine-to-five slog and striking out on your own, but it’s not the only one. The world of work has changed dramatically in recent decades, and the old rules no longer apply. Even if you wanted it, steady lifelong gigs ending with a pat on the back and a gold watch when you retire barely exist anymore.

Mail order might just be the best business model in the world.

First things first: quitting your job and going it alone is a big call, and only you can decide if it’s the right one. Before you take the plunge, answer these questions: Is your job fulfilling? Is the pay good? Would you continue doing it even if you didn’t need the money? If any of the answers are “no,” it’s time to get out for your own good. After all, unhappy people overeat, drink, smoke too much and – eventually – burn out.

So where do you start if you’ve decided you’re ready? Well, it’s time to learn about mail order commerce. The author has good reason to call it the greatest business model in the world – it’s how he made his millions. Here’s how it works.

Research the market and pick easy targets to ensure you choose products that sell.

Marketing expert Gary Hebert often plays a game with his audiences when he gives talks. What, he asks, would they choose as their advantage if they ran a burger stand in competition with his burger operation. The usual answers? The biggest stall, the best meat or the most prime location. Hebert concludes by telling them the advantage he’d chose: a hungry crowd.

It might seem like an obvious point, but billions of dollars are squandered every year by businesses that have forgotten Hebert’s lesson – you can only sell something if there’s an appetite for it. So, here’s your first maxim if you’re considering the mail order game: know your market, and decide what you’re going to sell accordingly.

Information is an ideal mail-order product: it’s cheap to produce and has high margins.

The best mail-order products are small, lightweight, sturdy enough to survive transportation and hard to find locally. Most importantly, they’ll have a high perceived value, and they cost little to produce. In this blink, we’ll take a look at one type of product that fits the bill.

Think back to all those people searching for “golf swing” on Google. What they were after was information. It’s one of the most sought-after products out there, and people pay good money for it. Best of all, getting it to market doesn’t require massive outlays. The author, for example, remembers once selling a four-page document for $65. The production costs? 65 cents for the paper and ink!

Saving is just as important as making money, and it’s simple to do when you know where to look.

By now you should have a good idea of how to start generating new income. But here’s the thing: looking after what you already have is just as important as making money. Shopping, in other words, is a skill, and buying smart makes all the difference. It’s the reason some folks get along just fine on $50,000 a year, and others struggle with $250,000.

The key is becoming more mindful about your consumer choices. It’s all about taking a step back before splashing out and asking yourself a simple question: Do you really need this, or is it an impulse purchase?

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What is The Millionaire Dropout about?

The Millionaire Dropout (2013) is an inspirational how-to manual for anyone ready to increase their income and their standard of living. Based on self-made multimillionaire Vince Stanzione’s first-hand experience of bootstrapping himself to success, these blinks will guide you through the difficult but ultimately rewarding journey of turning your life around and making the most of your potential.

Best quote from The Millionaire Dropout

Your present circumstances dont determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start. – Nido Qubein

—Vince Stanzione

Who should read The Millionaire Dropout?

Entrepreneurial self-starters
Anyone in a rut looking for a jumpstart
Would-be internet moguls

About the Author

Anglo-American author and businessman Vince Stanzione started out as an apprentice hairdresser before making his fortune in the heady days of the Thatcherite financial revolution in London. After going bust in the financial crash of 1987, he rebuilt his empire by focusing on mail order businesses and commodity trading. His debut title The Millionaire Dropout is a New York Times bestseller.

Categories with The Millionaire Dropout

Money & Investments Career & Success

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