“The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime” is the greatest book on entrepreneurship of all time. I cannot emphasize this enough – if you are starting from ground 0 in terms of getting into entrepreneurship you need to read this book. The author is amazing, the community is amazing, and the book is of course amazing.
Introduction
If I had to recommend one book for anyone getting into this stuff it would be The Millionaire Fastlane – it covers mindset and common lifestyle frameworks that force you into mediocrity, and it sets up a good framework for creating businesses (something I’ve craved in other business books but never got) as well as ties everything together with the author’s journey which could have been a great book by itself.
I read this book maybe 2 years ago at this point and it shifted my entire way of thinking. I needed something like this. Combined with all of the other reading I’ve been working on lately I’m reminded of just how powerful this book is.
The Millionaire Fastlane also covers basic personal financial concepts ranging from investing, buying a home, purchasing things, etc. As someone who has been studying and actively working and investing my money since the age of 15 – I can tell you with full confidence that this book is likely all you would ever need in terms of investing.
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Investing
You can invest all you want – even if you make the GREATEST investments what are you accomplishing? I spent years saving and investing which for my age was sort of impressive – in reality, I was just taking the easy way out. It’s EASY to work a job and save 100% of it when you live at home.
It’s HARD to earn meaningful amounts of money from business and provide value to people. It’s EASY to coast in an office job doing nothing slowly building up a portfolio.
I probably could have built a substantial portfolio while delaying my life living like a hermit and investing and working 24/7 to fund my account – it still wouldn’t amount to a fraction of what could be made through entrepreneurship.
I was never going to become a multi-millionaire, impact the amount of people I’m going to, and live the life I truly desire if I had stayed stuck in that mindset. I’m currently “less successful” (to everyone else) spending money and putting it into myself, my interests, and my business ideas but this will compound over time and is a priceless asset. The potential (and not guaranteed at all) 9% gains from the S&P 500 will be there when I hit millions.
When I was around 17 I got really into Martin Shkreli and watched his finance and healthcare videos – he’s one of my idols in terms of entrepreneurship and investing – he nailed this idea into my head as well: you cannot go from broke to rich investing.
He said this many times – it’s true. Great, your 100k made 9% with the S&P 500 – that’s NOTHING. The way he explained it is that if you are good at investing you begin to start sourcing other people’s money and charging a fee based on your unique skills (sounds like entrepreneurship).
Most of Shkreli’s money was made from biotech/pharma entrepreneurship – he states that even with all of the skills he has (he was studying investing from an extremely young age, interned with Jim Cramer, etc) he wasn’t good enough to continue running his fund (although he states he has done well investing for himself).
When you invest you are competing against the pros – are you investing in the S&P 500 blindly hoping that your money will go up forever? That a period like 2000-2012 won’t happen where the market didn’t gain at all? What about what happened with Japan – could that same thing happen to the US?
It’s POSSIBLE – are you going to bank your future on that chance? If you had millions it would be easy to put a portion away into safe passive interest-paying investments and then risk other portions into things like stocks, crypto, etc – but if you lose as an average person you’re done.
The reason I mention all this is because the book says the same thing and it’s 100% correct, investing isn’t bad per se but if you’re counting on it making you rich quickly you are extremely mistaken.
You don’t look at a 25-year-old in a Lamborghini and think he probably got it from putting 2k into the S&P 500 every month and living like a frugal hermit – that was likely earned through entrepreneurship, athletics, being a celebrity, etc.
It was not through stocks (unless he’s a day trading grifter). Although if you want to try day trading, searching out the next hot cryptocurrency, go for it (still easier when you have obscene amounts of money – if you lose 50k who cares but if through a bit of skill and luck, you hit a crazy gain of 5m then it means something).
I like the odds of entrepreneurship more personally. I’ve never been someone to take risks like that with money (a mindset I’m working on slightly altering – taking risks is a huge part of building businesses).
I recently read another book that focused on mastering personal finance and the author states you can’t earn your way to wealth because some people spend too much as they earn more. I understand this and see the issue but I had exactly the opposite issue – I had the willpower to work in an office job and save everything I earned but I struggled with earning money on a large scale in less amounts of time. That’s the entire reason I read this book.
If you’re a high earner with a spending problem this book isn’t entirely for you (although some parts would help).
Retirement
This is a concept I got from a (now deleted) video discussing the topic of the retirement system in the US.
The main idea of the video was that most people are saving up their entire lives just to be sick and old when they can finally “enjoy” the money that so diligently worked for over the past 40 years (still assuming the S&P 500 is alive and well here).
The book mentions a similar idea as well – and I 100% agree. The fact that most people work for 40 years to have a nest egg of 1 million (or less) sickens me.
Why would I be interested in wasting my life sinking 4 years into college, 40 years into working just to build a small nest egg, etc – ALL WHILE DOING A JOB THAT BENEFITS NOBODY AND CAN BE DONE IN JUST 2 HOURS DAILY?
This sounds soul-crushing and I cannot imagine doing that for the rest of my life (I did it for 5 years without taking action).
I’ve already proven I can succeed in living like a hermit and investing in the S&P 500 blindly hoping it goes up. I’m striving for more in every aspect of life – if you are intrigued by this idea this book is exactly for you. The author is exactly like us – the book sold so well because it’s REAL.
Entrepreneurship
The book is unique to me in that it sets up frameworks of types of businesses that you can create as well as tons of little guiding frameworks to make sure the business is viable.
As someone who struggled with finding (or sticking to) ideas, starting businesses, and then quitting minutes to days later, this book was immensely valuable.
For example, you probably wouldn’t want to pick up dropshipping – not that you cannot be successful with it but it’s too easy, anyone can do it so the competition is high. This is just one of the points your business idea needs to be checked through.
If you are someone who constantly seeks out entrepreneurship but has no idea what to do – this will help. Of course, you won’t get a list of businesses that will 100% work for you but it’s a framework of logic and ideas that you can implement into your goals. I found it immensely valuable.
Final Thoughts
I hope I was able to convey how much I love this book. If I could only read one book for the rest of my life this might be an option – that’s how much I got from it.
I was able to write all of this in a very quick time because the concepts stuck with me so well – and I’ve only read the book twice. The points I wrote about today are just three general ideas from the book – The Millionaire Fastlane is 300+ pages of pure gold and I highly suggest it.
The author also runs a forum where I logged on and was able to have some of my questions answered by the author himself – I had a bad plan and he saved me at least $5000 by suggesting that I implement my idea slightly differently.
I’ve gotten a lot of valuable information from users on that forum as well – it’s free to use so you lose nothing by joining. Something I’ve long craved is a forum dedicated to entrepreneurs who are doing things – you’ll find some “ick” in every community but I find this to be one of the highest quality (and active) forums on entrepreneurship (that I know of).
I know I sound like a hardcore fanboy of MJ DeMarco but I think the reason people enjoy his stuff so much is for the main reason I stated: the book offers a huge mindset shift, explains common financial frameworks that limit you, but also showcases frameworks and tests that you can go through to start working on providing real value to the marketplace. This isn’t a purely mindset book and it provides real value.
Either way, I hope you enjoyed and got some interesting ideas from the points I wrote about – if you want to support me (and the author) you can purchase The Millionaire Fastlane from my Amazon affiliate link here. I prefer buying some books physically because going outside and reading helps me focus.