I’ve been on the road for seven months travelling through Asia and Australia and as a digital nomad, excited about living a financially free lifestyle, it’s quite refreshing to read de Marco’s Fastlane Millionaire self help book.
I like reading books like this one. First, the author is the kind of underdog expert I like. He’s not Tim Ferris, he doesn’t use fancy terms, I won’t be reading what the whole world is reading and my thinking isn’t interrupted with incessant exercises. Like Allen Carr for smoking or Steven Pressfield for writing , MJ de Marco builds a thorough, plain how-to-guide for apprentice businessmen. More often than not, every page has some sort of breakthrough point causing serious questioning or utter bewilderment. I say bewilderment because I believe that’s the necessary step to welcoming the understanding of a new perspective. I was baffled when I read the writer’s sharp but offensive opinion on slowlaners. After all, my parents and most of my friends are slowlaners.
The book compares three metaphoric paths to becoming a millionaire under the appellation of lanes. Put simply, you’re either on the sidewalk, the slowlane or the fastlane. I’ll leave the sidewalk section out of this review since leeches are hardly worth mentioning. Most people are part of the slowlane -- in other words the rat race – working the in the 9 to 5 model, repeating relentlessly the same daily effort to gain crumbs of extra wealth. The slowlaner is on the slow path to wealth – the 40 years path to retirement. The financial plan the slowlaner adopts encompasses saving 10% of their salary, living like a meager, investing into the stock exchange (and in compound-interest-yielding solutions) and praying that by the time he turns 65, inflation or a Ponzi scam hasn’t annihilated his savings…and then there’s the risk of a heart attack, cancer, etc. Even if he makes it, he’s too old to be pleased with it.
I’ve got to say the first half of the book isn’t the most pleasant to read. Nor is it the most instructive for anybody with some reading pedigree. It’s repetitive and it strikes me as a bashing way to get the reader’s attention for the second part of the book. After all, what better way to sell the author’s fastlane to the reader in awe after reviewing all the downsides of the slowlane? The author’s style, quite abrupt at times, made me feel bitter and that’s not what I’m looking for in a book. De Marco is fastidious to say the very least and the read goes on and on. I’ve verified this aspect with a friend to who I suggested the book. We agreed, however, that once you got started on the fastlane part, the excruciatingly slow start to the book is all but forgotten and the serious learning can start. As the reading elapsed, it occurred to me that the first part of the book is a necessary mind stir to open it up to the newness of the fastlane.
Besides, because the fear of leaving a comfortable but unchallenging job is so overwhelming and conflicting, something requires shredding that resistance.
Crack the code to wealth
De Marco became a millionaire after building a multi-million internet-based business. He built it from scratch, after years of seeking an idea with a potential million at the end of it. Then, he persevered to be better than his competitors before selling it.
This is the right time to evoke the book’s subtitle, “Crack the code to wealth”, that de Marco uses to drive his point. When you’re in the slowlane, your potential for wealth increase is limited. You have a salary and can only expect so much from a raise. Assuming you don’t need to sleep, you’ll never be able to break the 24 hours threshold. In the fastlane however, your salary follows an uncontrolled unlimited leverage. The fact that the slowlane’s gains are limited by time contrasts with the fastlane’s exponential income leverage. Because the fastlaner can rely on an income factored by magnitude (how much you’re selling your product/service for) and by scale (the number of people you’re selling to) your gains are almost infinite. Numbers make the contrast more real, so here’s a numerical example inspired by the book:
If you’re making 10 bucks an hour and work fifty hours a week, you’re making 2000 bucks a month. Let’s say you get a 5% raise, you’ll make 2100 bucks a month. Your gain is linear and limited. Now let’s say you own an internet business that sells an web analytics tool you sell for 50 bucks a month to roughly 500 customers. Feeling confident with the competitiveness of your product, you increase your price to 75 bucks and with word of mouth making its way (and SEO improvements) on how good your product is, 1,000 people are now buying your product. Your monthly income has now inflated from 25,000 to 75,000 bucks; that’s a 300% raise.
This revealing contrast precedes a methodology and the outlines of a mindset to stick to the fastlane. It’s not going to be easy, says de Marco. The fastlane is not a Disneyland ride. No one is promising you you’ll make millions. Only you can take responsibility of that, through your choices. But with a focused process, designed toward success, the fastlaner can achieve in a few years what the slowlaner might only do in fourty.
Forget what you love, everybody is already doing that.
If one wants to build a successful business, it isn’t so much about what one loves to do. The fastlaner isn’t building something around his selfish need. It’s not about him.
At first, I found the injunction “Don’t do what you love” quite queer. Back in 2011, I read Marsha Sinetar’s “Do what you love, the money will follow” and it triggered an entrepreneurial thought process in me.
What am I doing with my life? I could be doing what I love and I could be making some money.
As much as I needed to believe that at the time, it hasn’t worked. After almost a year of penniless efforts doing what I love, I’ll admit de Marco has a point.
The argument speaks for itself: the “do what you love” path is now so cluttered that the offer has swamped the supply side of the equation, reducing prices (magnitude) and commoditizing the whole field (denting the scale potential). I like that De Marco advocates designing a business focus on a need instead, not on one’s “selfish” interest – Why would anyone care enough to pay for your interests? One can approach it by paying attention to people’s complaints and seeking for problems to solve. The doing what you love part can come after you’ve cracked your code to wealth.
Build a process to produce something valuable
Not only does de Marco refer to his experience as a business creator, he also uses testimonies from the fastlane forum where thousands of fastlaners discuss and support each other on a daily basis. The support of a community is required to build a process. Instead of dwelling on the event of success, the author stresses you can build a process to help you thrive: have a routine, delay gratification, find a community for support, learn, learn, and learn.
If you’re focused on events, you’ll be shifting projects constantly and running after every shiny object you’ll hear on the news or that someone’s told you about. In most cases, by the time the event has taken place, you’re already too late.
So, process gets results. De Marco suggests the process requires trial and error and it’s by repeating, repeating and repeating the same routine every day that you’ll produce something valuable. There’s something close to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of mastery in this .
Just like the avant-gardist Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit,” de Marco might argue that:
“Excellence is not an event, but a process.”
I’m still fine-tuning mine.
What’s yours?
The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime
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