The Millionaire Fastlane: Chapters (38-41) Summary

Ideas are nothing but neurological flatulence.
~ MJ DeMarco

The Strategy for Speed: Chess, Not Checkers

••The King: Your execution
••The Queen: Your marketing
••The Bishop: Your customer service
••The Knight: Your product
••The Rook: Your people
••The Pawn: Your ideas.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
•• Speed is the transformation of ideas to execution.
••Most people let powerful information expire and become worthless.
•• Successful Fastlane businesses are run multi-dimensionally, like a game of chess. One-dimensional businesses focus on price only.
•• Execution divides winners and losers from their ideas.
•• In business, execution is process. Ideas are events.
•• Ideas are potential speed. Execution is actual speed.
•• Others share your blockbuster idea. He who thinks the idea owns nothing. He who executes the idea owns everything.
•• Real money and momentum is created when an idea (potential speed) is matched with execution (accelerator pressure).
••An idea is neurological flatulence. Execution makes it smell like a rose.

Burn the Business Plan,
Ignite Execution

Having the world’s best idea will do you no good unless you act on it.
People who want milk shouldn’t sit on a stool in the middle of the field
in hopes that a cow will back up to them.
~ Curtis Grant

🔥The world tells you which direction you should be going at all times.

🔥Business plans are useless because they’re ideas jacked-up on steroids.

🔥Business plans are useless until they are married to execution. The best business plan in the world will always be a track record of execution.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
••The world gives clues to the direction you should be moving.
•• Business plans are useless because they are ideas on steroids.
••As soon as the world interacts with your ideas, your business plan is invalidated.
••The marketplace will steer you into directions that were previously unplanned for.
••The best business plan in the world is a track record of execution—it legitimizes the business plan.
•• If you have a track record of execution, suddenly people will want to see your business plan.
•• If you want your business to get funded, take action and create something that reflects tangible execution.
•• Investors are more likely to invest in something tangible and real; not ideas dissected ad nauseam on paper.

Pedestrians Will
Make You Rich!

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that.
Word of mouth is very powerful.
~ Jeff Bezos

Complaints are the world’s whispers hinting the direction you should be moving.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
•• Complaints are valuable insights into your customers’ minds.
•• Complaints of change are difficult to decipher and often require additional data to validate or invalidate.
•• Complaints of expectation expose operational problems in either your business, or in your marketing strategy.
•• Complaints of void expose unmet needs, raise the value of your product or service, and expose new revenue opportunities.
•• Great customer service is as simple as violating your customer’s low expectation in the positive.•• Poor service gaps are Fastlane opportunities.
•• Satisfied customers can be human resource systems who promote your business for free.
•• Satisfied customers have a dual residual effect: Repeat business and new business via discipleship.
••Your customer and their satisfaction hold the key to everything you selfishly want.
•• Looking big but acting small sets up customer service expectation violations in the positive.
•• Looking big can scare away potential competitors.

Throw Hijackers
to the Curb!

People are definitely a company’s greatest asset.
It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics.
A company is only as good as the people it keeps.
~ Mary Kay Ash

🔥Verify first, trust later

🔥All the intangibles in the world can’t change a poor customer service experience.

🔥Your employees drive the public’s perception of your company.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
••A business partnership is as important as a marriage.
••A good accountant and attorney will save you thousands, perhaps millions.
••Accountants and attorneys have the keys to your castle; make sure you trust them fully because they have the power to right or wrong you.
•• Unmitigated trust exposes you to unmitigated risk.
•• Unverified trust can lead to uncontrollable consequences.
••Your employees communicate the public’s perception of your company.
•• Fanatical customer service can overcome shortcomings, but fanatical features can’t overcome poor customer service.
•• Customer service philosophy is delivered from human interactions—not ambitious mission statements on a wall plaque in the CEO’s office.

Book Summary: The Real Anthony Fauci P.12

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Dr. Fauci’s challenge—to prove that HCQ is dangerous—was daunting because hydroxychloroquine is a 65-year-old formula that regulators around the globe long ago approved as both safe and effective against a variety of illnesses. HCQ is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the cinchona tree that George Washington used to protect his troops from malaria. For decades, WHO has listed HCQ as an “essential medicine,” proven effective against a long list of ailments.

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p13

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Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

Social habits are what fill streets with protesters who may not know one another, who might be marching for different reasons, but who are all moving in the same direction. Social habits are why some initiatives become world- changing movements, while others fail to ignite. And the reason why social habits have such influence is because at the root of many movements— be they large- scale revolutions or simple fluctuations in the churches people attend— is a three- part process that historians and sociologists say shows up again and again:
A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.
Usually, only when all three parts of this process are fulfilled can a movement become self- propelling and reach a critical mass.

In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and a few of different races— but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.

There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly. Studies show that people have no problems ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.

When job hunters approached strangers for assistance, they were rejected. When they appealed to friends, help was provided.

When sociologists have examined how opinions move through communities, how gossip spreads or political movements start, they’ve discovered a common pattern: Our weak- tie acquaintances are often as influential— if not more— than our close- tie friends.

Convincing
thousands of people to pursue the same goal— especially when that pursuit entails real hardship, such as walking to work rather than taking the bus, or going to jail, or even skipping a morning cup of coffee because the company that sells it doesn’t support organic farming— is hard. Most people don’t care enough about the latest outrage to give up their bus ride or caffeine unless it’s a close friend that has been insulted or jailed. So there is a tool that activists have long relied upon to compel protest, even when a group of people don’t necessarily want to participate. It’s a form of persuasion that
has been remarkably effective over hundreds of years. It’s the sense of obligation that neighborhoods or communities place upon themselves.
In other words, peer pressure.

Book Summary: Daring Greatly p18

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The statistics on post-traumatic-stress-related suicides, violence, addiction, and risk-taking all point to this haunting truth: For soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, coming home is more lethal than being in combat. From the invasion of Afghanistan to the summer of 2009, the US military lost 761 soldiers in combat in that country. Compare that to the 817 who took their own lives over the same period.

Lawyers—an example of a profession largely trained in win or lose, succeed or fail—have outcomes that aren’t much better. The American Bar Association reports that suicides among lawyers are close to four times greater than the rate of the general population.

When we teach or model to our children that vulnerability is dangerous and should be pushed away, we lead them directly into danger and disconnection.

DARING GREATLY: REDEFINING SUCCESS, REINTEGRATING VULNERABILITY, AND SEEKING SUPPORT

Love and belonging are irreducible needs of men, women, and children, and love and belonging are impossible to experience without vulnerability. Living without connection—without knowing love and belonging—is not victory.

Dare greatly and take actions that communicate to veterans or military families that they are not alone. Actions that communicate, “Your struggle is my struggle. Your trauma is my trauma. Your healing is my healing.”

If we’re forced into seeing the world through the Viking-or-Victim lens as a survival mechanism, then it can feel impossible or even deadly to let go of that worldview. How can we expect someone to give up a way of seeing and understanding the world that has physically, cognitively, or emotionally kept them alive? None of us is ever able to part with our survival strategies without significant support and the cultivation of replacement strategies. Putting down the Viking-or-Victim shield often requires help from a
professional—someone who understands trauma.

You can’t use vulnerability to discharge your own discomfort, or as a tolerance barometer in a relationship.

Ordinarily, when we reach out and share ourselves—our fears, hopes, struggles, and joy—we create small sparks of connection. Our shared vulnerability creates light in normally dark places.

When it comes to vulnerability, connectivity means sharing our stories with people who have earned the right to hear them—people with whom we’ve cultivated relationships that can bear the weight of our story. Is there trust? Is there mutual empathy? Is there reciprocal sharing? Can we ask for what we need? These are the crucial connection questions.

When we share vulnerability, especially shame stories, with someone with whom there is no connectivity, their emotional (and sometimes physical) response is often to wince, as if we have shone a floodlight in their eyes. Instead of a strand of delicate lights, our shared vulnerability is blinding, harsh, and unbearable. If we are on the receiving end, our hands fly up and cover our faces, we squeeze our entire faces (not just our eyes) shut, and we look away. When it’s over, we feel depleted, confused, and sometimes even manipulated. Not exactly the empathic response that those telling the story were hoping for.

Book Summary: Daring Greatly p17

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THE CARE AND FEEDING OF OUR SPIRITS

When we’re anxious, disconnected, vulnerable, alone, and feeling helpless, the booze and food and work and endless hours online feel like comfort, but in reality they’re only casting their long shadows over our lives. “Shadow comforts can take any form. It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference. You can eat a piece of chocolate as a holy wafer of sweetness—a real comfort—or you can cram an entire chocolate bar into your mouth without even tasting it in a frantic attempt to soothe yourself—a shadow comfort. You can chat on message boards for half an hour and be energized by community and ready to go back to work, or you can chat on message boards because you’re avoiding talking to your partner about how angry he or she made you last night.”

“It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference.”

Are my choices comforting and nourishing my spirit, or are they temporary reprieves from vulnerability
and difficult emotions ultimately diminishing my spirit? Are my choices leading to my Wholeheartedness, or do they leave me feeling empty and searching?

As we think about nourishing or diminishing our spirit, we have to consider how our numbing behaviors affect the people around us—even strangers.

When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.

Martin Buber, an Austrian-born philosopher, wrote about the differences between an I-it relationship and an I-you relationship. An I-it relationship is basically what we create when we are in transactions with people whom we treat like objects—people who are simply there to serve us or complete a task. I-you relationships are characterized by human connection and empathy. Buber wrote, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves—a force grounded in love and compassion.

THE SHIELD: VIKING OR VICTIM

Either you’re a Victim in life—a sucker or a loser who’s always being taken advantage of and can’t hold your own—or you’re a Viking—someone who sees the threat of being victimized as a constant, so you stay in control, you dominate, you exert power over things, and you never show vulnerability.

“The world is divided into assholes and suckers. It’s that simple.”

The Millionaire Fastlane: Chapters (36-37) Summary

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Find Your
Open Road

At first, people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done,
then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—
then it is done, and all the world wonders
why it was not done centuries ago.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

You’ve got a great idea, but someone is already doing it? So what. Do it better.
“Someone is doing it” is a monumental illusion imposing as an impassable obstacle. Someone is always already doing it. The bigger question is, can you do it better?

Skip the big idea and go for the big execution.

Unfortunately, the least-traveled Fastlane roads are paved in failure, not smooth asphalt. This means stalls are guaranteed. Everyone fails on the road to success.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
•• Opportunities are rarely about inventing breakthroughs, but about performance gaps, small inconveniences, and pain points.
•• Competition should not impede your road. Competition is everywhere, and your objective should be to “do it better.”
•• Fastlane success resides in execution, not in the idea.
••The world’s most successful entrepreneurs didn’t have a blockbuster ideas; they just took existing concepts and made them better, or exposed them to more people.
•• Opportunity is exposed in your language and your thought processes, as well as other people’s language.
•• Failure cracks open new roads.
•• Quitting only happens when you give up on your dream.

Give Your Road
a Destination

The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal.
The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.
~ Benjamin Mays

The end of the Fastlane road trip is to crown your happiness with freedom.

The Price of Freedom: Money

Freedom has a price, and that price is money. Big dreams, from materialistic Ferraris to altruistic nonprofit foundations, cost money. You can’t travel the world by swimming in the oceans. You have to pay your way, and if you think money is evil, you’ve already lost.

Set Your Destination: Four Steps to Starting

1) Define the Lifestyle: What do you want?
2) Assess the Cost: How much do your dreams cost?
3) Set the Targets: Set the money system and business income targets.
4) Make It Real: Fund it and open it!

The Rules of the Road: Financial Literacy

Managing a Money System Demands Financial Literacy

You can’t build a financial empire if you’re ignorant of basic finance and economics. These disciplines are the building blocks to a financial empire, and without them the Sidewalk becomes a danger. Remember, more money doesn’t solve money problems. To successfully leverage a money system for passivity, you have to familiarize yourself with financial instruments that fuel the money system.

Live Below Your Means—Slowlane?

The first rule of financial literacy: “Live below your means.” Yes, a pragmatic doctrine echoed from Slowlane dogmaticians that is an affable replacement for its mathematical equivalent of “Keep expenses under your income.” Earn 10 bucks and don’t spend 20. But is it Fastlane relevant? Absolutely, with one distinction: Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.

Slowlaners seek to minimize expenses while the Fastlaner seeks to maximize income and asset values.

“Live below your means” requires above-average discipline.

A Financial Adviser Doesn’t Fix Illiteracy

Literacy gives you the power to evaluate your adviser’s advice. literacy is insurance

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
••The Fastlane is the means to your end because dreams cost money.
•• Conquer big goals by breaking them down to their smallest component.
•• Daily saving reinforces your relationship with money; it is your passive system that buys freedom and another soldier added to your army.
••A money system isn’t used to grow wealth but to grow income. Growing wealth should be left to your Fastlane road.
••You will struggle to build a financial empire if you are financially illiterate.
••“Live below your means” is relevant at any income level.
•• For the Fastlaner, “Live below your means” means to expand your means.
••A financial adviser doesn’t solve financial illiteracy and literacy is insurance.
•• Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.

Book Summary: The Real Anthony Fauci P.11

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In numerous countries and regions around the world, repeated, striking temporally associated reductions in both cases and deaths occurred very soon after either ivermectin was distributed or health ministry ivermectin recommendations were announced. Dr. Fauci and the industry propagandists later attributed the January decline in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to their vaccines, which began their rollout in mid-December 2020. However, even mainstream media doctors reluctantly acknowledged that the drop could not possibly be a vaccine effect. By February 1, only 25.2 million, or 7.6 percent of Americans, had received a single vaccine dose. The CDC acknowledges that there is no effect until many weeks after the second COVID jab.

Tony Fauci’s decision to deny early treatments undoubtedly prolonged and intensified the pandemic.

Early treatment does not just prevent hospitalization; it quickly starves pandemics to death by stopping their spread. “Early treatment reduces the infectivity period from 14 days to about four days. It also allows someone to stay in the home so they don’t contaminate people outside the home. And then it has this remarkable effect in reducing the intensity and duration of symptoms so patients don’t get so short of breath, they don’t get into this panic where they feel they have to break containment and go to the hospital.”

Every hospitalization in America—and there’s been millions of them—has been a super-spreader event. Sick patients contaminate their loved ones, paramedics, Uber drivers, people in the clinic and offices. It becomes a total mess.”

By treating COVID-19 at home, doctors actually can extinguish the pandemic.

Dr. Fauci led an effort to deliberately derail America’s access to lifesaving drugs and medicines that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and dramatically shortened the pandemic. There is no other aspect of the COVID crisis that more clearly reveals the malicious intentions of a powerful vaccine cartel—
led by Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates—to prolong the pandemic and amplify its mortal effects in order to promote their mischievous inoculations.

From the outset, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and other therapeutics posed an existential threat to Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates’ $48 billion COVID vaccine project, and particularly to their vanity drug remdesivir, in which Gates has a large stake. Under federal law, new vaccines and medicinescannot quality for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) if any existing FDA-approved drug proves effective against the same malady.

If any FDA-approved drug like hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin) proved effective against COVID, pharmaceutical companies would no longer be legally allowed to fast-track their billion-dollar vaccines to
market under Emergency Use Authorization. Instead, vaccines would have to endure the years-long delays that have always accompanied methodical safety and efficacy testing, and that would mean less profits, more uncertainty, longer runways to market, and a disappointing end to the lucrative COVID-19 vaccine gold rush. Dr. Fauci has invested $6 billion in taxpayer lucre in the Moderna vaccine alone. His agency is co-owner of the patent and stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of Fauci’s hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000/year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid by the American public.

HCQ is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the cinchona tree that George Washington used to protect his troops from malaria. For decades, WHO has listed HCQ as an “essential medicine,” proven effective against a long list of ailments. It is a generally benign prescription medicine, far safer according to the manufacturer’s package inserts—than many popular over-the-counter drugs.

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p12

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There is evidence that a preference for things that sound “familiar” is a product of our neurology. Scientists have examined people’s brains as they listen to music, and have tracked which neural regions are involved in comprehending aural stimuli. Listening to music activates numerous areas of the brain, including the auditory cortex, the thalamus, and the superior parietal cortex. These same areas are also associated with pattern recognition and helping the brain decide which inputs to pay attention to and which to ignore.

Scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game.

Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored. That’s why songs that sound “familiar”—even if you’ve never heard them before— are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard. Much of the time, we don’t actually choose if we like or dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the cues (“This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked”) and rewards (“It’s fun to hum along!”) and without thinking, we either start singing, or reach over and change the station.

“Soldiers were more likely to eat food, whether familiar or unfamiliar, when it was prepared similar to their prior experiences and served in a familiar fashion.”

Book Summary: Daring Greatly p16

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Daring Greatly

Shame enters for those of us who experience anxiety because not only are we feeling fearful, out of control, and incapable of managing our increasingly demanding lives, but eventually our anxiety is compounded and made unbearable by our belief that if we were just smarter, stronger, or better, we’d
be able to handle everything.

With disconnection it’s a similar story. We may have a couple of hundred friends on Facebook, plus a slew of colleagues, real-life friends, and neighbors, but we feel alone and unseen.

Because we are hardwired for connection, disconnection always creates pain. 😩 One stop beyond disconnection is isolation, which presents real danger.

“We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of
human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”

Shame often leads to desperation. 😔

For women, setting boundaries is difficult because the shame gremlins are quick to weigh in: “Careful saying no. You’ll really disappoint these folks. Don’t let them down. Be a good girl. Make everyone happy.” For men, the gremlins whisper, “Man up. A real guy could take this on.

We know that daring greatly means engaging with our vulnerability, which can’t happen when shame has the upper hand, and the same is true for dealing with anxiety-fueled disconnection. The two most powerful forms of connection are love and belonging—they are both irreducible needs of men, women, and children. If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

Connection: Connection is the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment.

Belonging: Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Chapters (33-35) Summary

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The Commandment
of Scale
In business, to be a success you only have to be right once.
~ Mark Cuban

When your business road violates the Commandment of Scale, wealth acceleration is incarcerated within constricting speed limits. Drive any road with a speed limit of 15 and you aren’t going to get anywhere fast.

Swing for Home Runs, Not Singles. be in the business of home runs.

The Fastlane Wealth Equation: Disarmed

Wealth = Net Profit + Asset Value

Net Profit = Units Sold × Unit Profit

Tiny habitats create tiny wealth.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
••Your total pool of customers determines your habitat. The larger the habitat, the greater the potential for wealth.
••A business can be a singles or a home-run-based business. Its strength is determined by scale, which is derived by habitat.
••The Fastlane wealth equation is disarmed when you violate the Commandment of Scale.

•• Scale is achieved in reach (units sold) and/or magnitude (unit profit).
••The Law of Effection is the primary conduit to wealth, which can be roadblocked by scale, magnitude, or source.
•• Effection consequences trickle up to owners and producers. Breaking scale or magnitude indirectly in an uncontrolled entity is not a guarantee of wealth.
•• To gain access to Effection, you have to break the barrier of scale or magnitude in an entity you control.
•• Scale, magnitude, or source deficiencies create governors on the speed of wealth creation.

The Commandment
of Time
I am long on ideas, but short on time.
I expect to live only about a hundred years.
~ Thomas Edison

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
••A business attached to your time is a job.
••A business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time.
•• To satisfy the Commandment of Time, start with a business that uses a money system seedling, or introduce one.

Rapid Wealth:
The Interstates
You can’t live a perfect day without doing something
for someone who will never be able to repay you.
~ John Wooden

The Three Fastlane Interstates:

1) Internet
2) Innovation
3) Intentional Iteration

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
••The best Fastlanes satisfy all five Commandments: Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale.
••Assuming a need-based premise, the Internet is the fastest interstate, because it overwhelmingly satisfies all Commandments.
•• Innovation can be any variety of open roads: authoring, inventing, or services.
•• Inventing success needs coupling with distribution.
••A singles-based business is scaled to a home-run business by intentional iteration. With iteration, scale is conquered.