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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
The Millionaire Fastlane summary
MJ DeMarco
Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!
16 mins
What is The Millionaire Fastlane about?
The Millionaire Fastlane (2011) is an international best-selling guide that reveals the quickest path to wealth in order to retire early and actually enjoy the benefits of financial freedom while you’re still young. The method teaches how to overcome flawed beliefs about building wealth and presents mathematical evidence for why traditional routes rarely produce results and how the “fastlane” dramatically improves your odds.
Table of Contents
The Millionaire Fastlane
summarized in 4 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 4
First, figure out your money mentality
When it comes to money, there are three types of people in the world: Sidewalkers, Slowlaners, and Fastlaners, as DeMarco calls them. Which one are you?
Let’s do a quick check:
Do you frequently jump jobs for higher pay and spend most of your money as soon as you receive it? Do you rely heavily on your available credit, count on luck, and generally live in the moment? If so, you’re a sidewalker. Don’t feel too bad: according to DeMarco, this is the most common mentality. And hey, you’re probably taking in this information for a reason.
Do you have a steady job with a competitive salary and save a considerable amount of your income? Do you avoid debt and risk at almost all costs and look forward to retiring comfortably in your twilight years? In this case, you’re a slowlaner. Again, no need for shame since it’s the second most common mentality and you’re probably here for help on that.
Do you own your business, reinvest most of your profits in the business and yourself, and calculate risk against potential gain? Do you rarely ask yourself whether you can afford things? Congratulations on being a fastlaner, or at least meeting a few of the many characteristics. There still may be more you can learn to further multiply your good fortune.
But if you identify with the first two mindsets, as most do, the most important point to remember is that anyone can jump from the sidewalk to the slow lane, the slow lane to the fast lane, or, as DeMarco did, leap from the sidewalk to the fast lane.
In fact, an idea gleaned from his last dead-end job actually opened the door to his next opportunity. Before moving away from his mom’s to a new city, he was a limo driver and frequently heard customers ask about booking services in other cities. He taught himself how to build a website to answer that need. But he’d been so busy juggling his soul-crushing job and sad existence, he hadn’t put much effort into marketing it, much less enhancing it. That changed once he was in a new city with little money and no job. He used what he’d learned to build one-off websites for other people to pay the bills. He considered that to be his side hustle while putting most of his effort into marketing and growing his own online business, taking risks, and continuing to teach himself almost everything along the way.
Soon, he had several offers to buy the company and took the highest bid of $1.2 million. When the new owners couldn’t sustain its success, he bought it back for $250,000. He then went about rebuilding it to turn huge profits, living very well off it in the meantime. Finally, he sold the company a second time for many millions more than the first sale and retired at the age of 33.
Now consider again the questions you were asked earlier and how this fastlaner mentality contrasts so dramatically with those of the sidewalker and the slowlaner. You should see what it takes to make that leap. Own where you stand now and firmly decide you’re willing to make the changes and then do the work to stay the course. If you’re a slowlaner, you’d probably not take the risk of moving to a new city with little money, no job, or much of a plan. A sidewalker would be more likely to risk the move and hope for the best, but their next step would be to find a decent-paying job with no future. Or, they might find a job with a good salary and savings plan, finally graduating to slowlaner status. “Hooray!” they might be thinking – as a fastlaner zooms by in their dream car.
You should be in that car! Or perhaps you don’t really care about a car, specifically. Maybe you want everything that true wealth comprises, which DeMarco defines as “family, fitness, and freedom.”
In the next section, we’ll take a look at the math behind what will get you there.
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Who should read The Millionaire Fastlane?
- Anyone who wants to learn how to get rich quickly
- People who can’t understand why wealth seems elusive
- Anyone disappointed in the time it takes to accumulate wealth through traditional methods
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