20 Lessons From The Millionaire Fastlane That Changed My Finances

This is one of the best finance books that I have ever read, if not the best. It's really been changing my mindset, a lot of core beliefs. It's made me take some actions, completely change how I look at my business. These are 20 of my top takeaways that can hopefully change your life as well. If you're not wealthy, then just stop. Clearly, what you're doing is not working. The conventional wisdom, the things we hear all the time, so we might need to change what path we're going down. And normal is not something we should aspire to. It is something that we should get far away from. Let's say you see somebody who's got three brand new cars that they paid cash for. They have a $3 million house. They're balling. They're living the lifestyle. They're traveling. If you ask that person how they got rich, they are not gonna tell you, well, I put away 10% of my income into dividend stocks. And then, yeah, now I'm 38 and I'm worth $10 million. 0% chance that's gonna happen. And yet, that's what a lot of conventional personal finance people will tell you to do. They'll tell you to put 5%, 10%, 15% of your money into the stock market. And eventually, once you're 65, you will be a millionaire, which may be true. But if you ever wanna get to that point where you have multiple millions of dollars in your 20s, 30s, 40s, then you just cannot do it the conventional way. It's just impossible. So if you wanna do it the other way, that's totally fine. But if you wanna do it this unconventional way and actually build real wealth sooner, you can't do what everybody else is doing. It's literally impossible for it to work. So what do you need to do? You need to build a money tree. A money tree is something that pays you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You're sleeping, you're at the gym, you're on vacation, you're doing whatever you're doing, you're still making money. It's separating earning money from time spent. That means you no longer have to do eight hours of work for eight hours of pay. You put in a bunch of work for no pay, and then eventually you get a bunch of pay for no work. It means if you invest $10, you get a dollar back per year for the rest of your life. You're planting a seed of a money tree. And yes, a dollar a year for the rest of your life isn't really gonna make a big difference. But if you have $5 million as your money tree, you can be making $40,000 a month for the rest of your life without doing any work. That is a money tree, and I'll explain the steps on how to get there in the rest of this video. It's important to realize that wealth is a process, not an event. Even the people you see get lucky and get rich quick and get this huge paycheck, it's not really an event. It is a process that leads to it. Let's look at like Patrick Mahomes. Dude signed like a $450 million deal, absolutely insane money. Who knows if he gets all of that money, but it doesn't really matter. That seems like an event. He signed a contract instantly, 45 mil a year, crazy money. But he's been building towards that since he was in middle school. He's been putting in hours every single day for no money throughout all of high school, maybe a little bit of money through college, and then eventually gets to the NFL, starts making more money, and then bang, the event happens because of years and thousands and tens of thousands of hours of work that led to this getting lucky, signing a huge deal. That's crazy. It's a process, not an event. But the process does lead to the event. Pick your lane. The book describes three different lanes that most of us go through in life. We got the sidewalk, we got the slow lane, which I lived in most of my life, really until reading this book. And then we got the fast lane, which I hope to be getting onto. Again, I'm not an expert. I'm just some dude trying to figure this out and sharing what I'm learning with you guys. So let's start with the sidewalk. What is that? The plan of those on the sidewalk is to have no plan. You get money, you spend it right away. You get the flashy new thing. You're probably in a little bit of debt. As soon as you get a raise, you get a bigger apartment. As soon as you get a raise, you get a new car. And then that car gets a flat tire and suddenly you're in credit card debt because you had no emergency fund, because you had no plan, and that is the way of the sidewalk. If you think you can afford it, you can't. If you have to do mental gymnastics, well, if I get a raise or if my stocks go up a little bit, or if the sale of this goes through, my partner gets a job, whatever it is, if that happens, then I'll be able to afford it. It won't be a real big issue. Yeah, I'll get that. I'll get that Tesla. I'll get that boat. I'll get that extra apartment. I'm gonna get a raise soon. It'll be all good. You can't afford it. When you see wealthy people buying a 70, $80,000 car in cash, to them, that is the same as us going and buying like a stick of gum. It makes zero impact in our finances. It's when you spend money and it doesn't really change what your bank account looks like. That's when you know you can afford something. If you have to really worry about it and bump out the payments for five years and do all this crazy stuff, then you can't afford it and you should stop spending money. All right, so let's look at the slow lane. The slow lane is the conventional stuff that you hear. It's go to college, get a good job, make some money. It's even like the conventional version of the FIRE movement, where if you invest every month and put money in your 401k, once you reach 50 or 60, you might have one to $2 million and you'll be able to retire. Always be super frugal. Never go out and spend money on coffee, something that's been really sad. No, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of positives through this. It's a good way for a lot of people. It's allowed me to leave my job, but also it revolves around being very frugal. It never looks at like, how can I go to that next level where I can kind of live this type of lifestyle, where I can make a lot of money? How do I go from making 100k a year to 100k a month? It never really enters the equation of the slow lane. But that being said, it's still like a billion times better than the sidewalk. The victim law. If you blame others for your misfortunes, you are in the slow lane. It's the old, they laid me off, they screwed me over, they cheated me out of that. They raised my rent. They didn't tell me about that. If your landlord raised your rent, is it his fault that you chose to live there? If your job lays you off, is it your fault that you chose to apply for that company and get that job? You're choosing to let somebody else have control over your life. And if they exercise that control in a negative way to you, that's your fault for giving them control over your life. If you're getting $11 an hour and you're mad at your employer for not giving you a raise, it's your fault for taking a job that pays $11 an hour. And if you're sick of that, you need to raise your value to society. I used to earn $11 an hour. I used to earn like under that, like eight bucks an hour. That's because I didn't have any value to society. As I raised my value and I impacted more people, I got paid more money. I got what I deserved. I didn't really add any value. The five, two rule. This might be my favorite idea in this book. This is what most of us spend our entire lives doing. We trade five hours of work doing something that we don't love, or in some cases we hate, in order to have two days that we enjoy. This is just a horrible trade. Instead, he recommends doing the 7-0-0-7 trade. This is what I did for like three years, even though I didn't realize I was doing this. It's starting some type of business. You're living in that business. You're creating something. You're planting those seeds like we talked about. Seven days a week, you're grinding. You're making something happen. You're building it. And then eventually once you can separate your time from that business, you flip it from a 7-0 to an 0-7, and you can still make that same money because you put in all that effort up front and work zero days a week or one day a week. But most people are unwilling to put in that extra effort, that 7-0 effort, to get the chance of an 0-7, and instead they're willing to take that 60% negative trade of five for two, of five days working for two days off. And for most people, that just kind of sucks. The 40-year rule. Let's say you invest 7,500 bucks a year for 40 years earning 8%. You're gonna end up with about $2.1 million. So if you do that from the time you're 20 to the time you're 60, 2.1 million. That's a lot of money. And I think that's what we hear all the time in the slow lane advice. It's like, invest early, and you're gonna have all this money once you retire. But also consider the fact that you're gonna be 60, and that money's probably gonna be worth 50% of that, so maybe 1.1 mil. And even nowadays, you can't really retire on 1.1 mil, so that's not even all that much money. And you're not gonna be able to really enjoy it or use it in the best years of your life. So what you should do, get rich quick. So before you click away, there is a difference between get rich easy, which is what we see everywhere, and get rich quick-ish, kind of quick. So here are some examples of get rich quick. The guy that builds a smartphone application that sells 50,000 times. The guy who patents a product process and then license it to a Fortune 500 company that makes $14 million. The guy who creates a $20,000 a month supplement business, allowing him to travel the world that later sells for $560,000. The author who writes a book about teenage wizards who goes on to become a billionaire. These are all examples of getting rich quick. So really, the rule here is, if you wanna make millions, you need to affect millions. If you're working at the front desk of a hotel and you interact with 100 people a day, your bank account will affect the lack of impact that you have. That's just a fact. When I used to clean offices, I didn't really affect anybody's lives and I didn't make any money. But if you write a book that is read by millions of people, you will make millions of dollars. If you create enormous value for thousands of people, you change their lives, you'll probably make millions of dollars. If you entertain or educate in order to make real money, you need to scale. And if you wanna help me scale, then feel free to subscribe because like 70% of you guys are not subscribed, which is crazy. It's completely free. Yeah. The $6 bucket of chicken. In the book, he mentions that a fast food restaurant had like these online coupons where if you bring them in, you get a free $6 bucket of chicken. And there was news articles about people waiting in line for hours to get this free $6 bucket of chicken. And those people valued their time at like zero. If you wait for two hours for a free $6 and you value your time at $3 an hour, you just hate yourself. It really doesn't make any sense. And this is a idea that I've been thinking about a lot. It's just when you're in the slow lane, you are frugal with your money. When you're in the fast lane, you're frugal with your time. Your time is the most valuable possession that you have. Don't give it away for a $6 bucket of chicken or waiting in line for stuff or driving out of the way for stuff or just doom scrolling. Your time is worth something. You are worth something. But then of course, there is the easiest roadblock in the world, which is I can't afford it, which is just downright laziness, which it turns out I've been caught in for a while because I've been hoping to get a farm at some point, but I always think I can't afford that. I might never be able to afford that. When I look at a new Tesla, I might never be able to afford that. And that's the easiest scapegoat, because what do you do? You just don't get it. Easy, it's got free. But instead, much like rich dad, poor dad, if you ask, how can I afford that? Your brain has to come off the couch. It has to put down the bag of Doritos and it has to say, all right, how can I afford to buy $100,000 car in cash and have it not affect my finances? I need to create a business. I need to stop watching TV. I need to get up and do something. I need to change people's lives. Otherwise my life will never be changed, which leads to the point, if everybody's doing it, I am not really good at naming these points, but the idea here is if everybody is doing it, it is a clear sign that you should not do that thing. Like with pretty much everything. If everybody is selling their houses, it's a perfect time to buy. If everybody's selling their stocks, it's the perfect time to buy. If everybody's buying a stock, you should probably sell it. If everybody's starting a dropshipping business, you should look for the businesses that nobody's talking about. So instead of having 5,000 competitors, because it's a popular thing to do right now, you pick a niche, niche thing that has 12 competitors and you just do it better than those 12 people and you can grow something big in that small space as opposed to fighting off the hordes of other people trying to do these popular things. Just remember that everything popular is wrong. Chase needs not money. So at this point you might be thinking, yeah, I need a second income stream. I want lots of money. This is great. So I'm just gonna start something. That's what I've done in the past and for every one of those, it's pretty much failed. Instead, you need to look for a few different things. You need to look for pain points. You need to look to solve a problem for people. You need to look at providing value for people, which leads into the next point, which is 1 million people. If you're looking for the business to start, the way to make money, what to do next, here's a great place to start. It's gonna be different for everyone. Your goal is to affect 1 million people in one of these nine ways. Make them feel better. Entertainment, music, video games. Help them solve a problem. Educate them. Make them look better. Maybe health, nutrition, clothing, makeup. Give them security, housing, safety, food. Enhance their dreams and give hope. If you do any of those things for 1 million people, you can almost be guaranteed to be a millionaire. The last point here is that plans are completely worthless. Everybody has a plan. Everybody has a business idea. Everybody has that thing that, man, I thought of that or why didn't I think of that? Ideas and business plans are absolute garbage worthless if you do not take action. So after you subscribe, shut off this video and take some action on something. And remember that we greatly overestimate what we can do in one year, but we greatly underestimate what we can do in 10 years. If you enjoyed this video, then check out Webull and you can get up to 12 free stocks when you open and fund an account. So honestly, even if you don't wanna use it, it's just free money, but it is what I use personally. Anyways, thanks for watching.