The Best Book I've Ever Read about Making Money

all right so in this video i'm going to summarize some of the insights from this book the millionaire fast lane i thought that this was going to be really bad when a friend recommended it to me and then this friend said no trust me ignore the clickbaity title the millionaire fast lane and read the book because it's genuinely really good and it is genuinely really good this is probably the single best book i have ever read on how to build a business that makes money and so in this episode of book club which is the

series where we distill and discuss highlights from some of my favorite books we're going to be breaking down five key lessons from the book and also the five commandments of building a business that mjd marker talks about how to get rich quick now the first important lesson in the book is that we want to avoid the slow lane and the point that our friend mj makes in the book is that get rich quick is like is often seen as like a scammy thing oh it's a get-rich-quick scheme but actually it's not get-rich-quick that's a problem

it is get rich easy like it is very possible to get rich quick and that is why we're talking about the millionaire fast lane it's very possible to get rich quick but it's not at all possible to get rich easy and so if someone is trying to sell you that it is easy to get rich that is a scam and you should avoid it and one of the interesting things that he talks about in the book is the idea that there are three paths through life there's path number one which is the sidewalk there's path

two the slow lane and path number three the fast lane the sidewalk is basically where people who are living paycheck to paycheck live people who don't have a lot of money i'm not going to talk about it too much it's a bit disparaging it's a very like american style of sort of very brash way of describing it that he does like you know if you're living on the sidewalk then you're living paycheck to paycheck and like your life is crude because you believe that like you know the government is screwing you over all that kind

of stuff we're not going to talk about that too much there are a little a few a few bits like that in the book where you have to kind of read or listen to it with a little bit little pinch of salt but i think the second part through life the slow lane is interesting because if you follow the slow lane you can still get rich and the slow lane is generally if you're watching this probably your parents generation stood by the slow lane the idea of the slow lane is that you know you go

to school you get good grades you get a decent job you work your way up the ladder in your job whatever your job is you save some percentage of your paycheck you put that into investments maybe in the stock market if you're particularly rogue but probably you know you should invest in property and real estate because property is a good investment and over time eventually you will have enough of a nest egg such that when you retire then you will be rich and you can enjoy your retirement at the age of 65 when you have

osteoarthritis in both of your knees that is basically the idea of the slow lane and he talks about how there are three traps that we can fall into which will end up keeping us on the slow lane the first trap is that life in the slow lane looks like it's pretty safe like you could think that okay once i get this job then my life is pretty safe and i'm pretty sorted but if the pandemic has taught us anything and if you know the way the world is at the moment a it's actually not that

safe you actually could lose your job if you're fine if you're a doctor or something like like that where you're unlikely to lose your job that's that's still pretty safe but even so what he says is that there are a ton of other unexpected events that happen in life like if there's a market crash like there was in 2008 or if you have kids or if you get divorced or if you have an elf if you have a health problem and you live in a stupid country like america where that could potentially bankrupt you there

are all of these fairly common unexpected events that can happen in life that make life in the slow lane not actually as safe an option as it might have been for our parents generation the second trap that slow laners can fall into is this idea that if we build our intrinsic market value enough then we will get rich so for example these are the people who think okay i've worked my job for two years now i'm gonna go and get an mba and pay like however many tens of thousands of dollars to get an mba

because then once i have that degree then i will be worth more to my future employer but the problem with that start of thinking is that it's not really the fast lane approach to building wealth it is still ultimately trading your time for money and yes fine if you get that extra degree if you get the extra qualification your time will be worth more a little bit more maybe even significantly more but ultimately you're still just trading your time for money and that is a very like slow laney a way to approach building wealth and

the third trap that slow dangers can fall into is just not even believing it's possible to get rich quick unless you're super lucky or super talented but as mj says even if you can't get rich easy which is not a thing you can get rich relatively quick if quick is 10 years 10 years is the definition of quick which to be honest is pretty quick but a lot of us when we think edward get rich quick we think in a few weeks like that is not a thing what he's arguing for is a process that

will take probably around 10 years to get rich quick and that is actually quick in his book and that brings us on to lesson number two which is to work the process now in the book he talks a lot about how wealth is not an event like getting rich is not this sort of binary thing where one day you're living paycheck to paycheck and the next day suddenly you've got millions in the bank it is a long drawn-out process that takes usually many years to do but the problem is that the media often reports wealth

as being an event and those are the stories we latch on to one of the stories he talks about is this guy john darius bickoff who founded glacio vitamin water in 1996 and 11 years later he sold the company to coca-cola for 4.1 billion and in that 11 year long story the thing that people remember is the event but what they forget is the process of 11 years that took so long to get to that point therefore wealth building is not an event it's a process and it's exactly the same thing with like building a

creative business being building a youtube channel like you know it's it's easy to see creators and their overnight successes and all that jazz but you don't see the five years they spent making videos that no one was watching to get to the point where they could then have the event of the overnight success all right so lesson number three is to build money trees now we've all heard that phrase that money doesn't grow on trees but what he says in the book is money does actually grow on trees provided you build a tree that grows

money so what does this mean well he says in the book that money trees are business systems that survive on their own they require periodic support and nurturing but they survive on their own creating a surrogate for your time for money trade basically what we're doing is we're building a business we're building this money tree where the amount of wealth we can generate is not directly tied to the amount of time that we're putting into it this brings us to the next question which is how do we actually build a money tree and he talks

about there's like four or five different types of money trees that we could potentially build the first one is that we could build a rental system and a rental system is basically anything that involves renting out something that you already own so if you have a bunch of real estate like properties and you rent them out that is a rental system the problem is it's very hard to get to the point where you have a bunch of properties to rent out because you're already probably rich at that point the other way of building a rental

system is by licensing for example if you're a musician and you want to license your audio that other people can use in a way they're paying you rent for this thing that you own secondly what you could do is you could build a distribution system and this is basically a system that connects people who want something with the people who are supplying that thing so for example amazon is a distribution system it connects buyers with sellers and amazon is the middleman and therefore if you build the middleman if you build a distribution system you can

get really really really really rich now interestingly one really great distribution system is a company like appsumo who are completely coincidentally sponsoring this video appsumo is run by my friend noah kagan it's a ridiculously great company and what they do is that they give you the best deals in software and their model connects people who want software people like me and you probably if you're watching this you're interested in software just as much as i am with the people that want to sell software that have software software they want to sell and they give you

that software in a way that's either free or just like amazingly well priced every week there's new deals added to the website and it's not just software it's also online courses it's also education and so if you want to learn anything in this how to build a business fear appsumo probably has it covered and the whole vibe of appsumo is that it's very like indie hacker startup kind of vibes like they do have a couple of tools that are suited for enterprises mostly it's aimed at individuals and small businesses which is probably the type of

business you want to make if you want to get rich quick using the millionaire fastlane and i'm even recording this to you from the future to tell you all about their black friday giveaway so last year on black friday they gave away a tesla which was pretty cool but this year they're giving away a million dollars worth of stuff to entrepreneurs not who buy their products but who list their own products on the appsumo marketplace so if you have a product that you want to sell on the appsumo marketplace and you list it somewhere between

now and november 17th 2021 then the first 400 people just to list a product will will get a thousand dollars of free money from the app server team and the next 2 000 people to list a product are going to get 250 completely for free you don't even have to make any sales for your product you will just get that free money in return for just listing your product on the marketplace that's pretty cool and then everyone who enters of those 10 people will be lucky dipped to get 10 000 which is also pretty sick

so if you've got any kind of digital product and you want to stick it on appsumo you can check out the marketplace to see what things you want to buy because they're all discounted but you can also sell your thing on appsumo and it's pretty easy you just submit your product you go live with it and then you get paid so again if you list your product on appsumo marketplace up until november the 17th 2021 then you can grab your share of the one million dollar giveaway fund and you might be one of 10 people

lucky enough to win a check for ten thousand dollars if that sums up your street hit the link in the video description you can check out all the products and you can potentially sell your own thing so thank you absuma for sponsoring this video all right thirdly when it comes to building a money tree we have a software system but it is five o'clock and have a zoom call to attend so i will be right back all right we're back we've got a slight change to the lighting but the third type of system that you

can make to make this money tree i'm so glad i'm so glad that worked i i really hope this is going to work in in the edit anyway the third type of money tree we want to create is a software system now that's pretty standard you make the software once and then you can charge people for the software or for the digital product and then you can make money multiple times because the cost of distribution and the cost of replication is effectively zero i've made a bunch of software products in my time when i was

in med school i built something called bmat and ucat ninja which was like a software platform that helped people get into med school by helping them prepare for the immense school admissions exams one of my youtuber friends olio managed to make nine thousand dollars in a single week by selling icons that he designed so that's a digital asset he puts the work into creating it once and it's sort of like a software system whereby other people can just buy the thing because it is ultimately software and the fourth system that our friend mda talks about

is my favorite kind and that is the content money tree the content system where basically the idea is you create content so if you write a book or make a youtube video or write a blog post or make an online course that you can sell ultimately this is all content it takes a investment of time and effort to write the book or create the content once but then you can sell it to multiple people further down the line and similar to the digital stuff it has a basically zero cost of replication and distribution assuming it's

on on the internet and if it's a book well then there's some cost associated with it but it's still broadly a way of making money that's not tied to your own time for example like two years ago now a year ago or something i made a skillshare class about how to study for exams and that class brings in about ten thousand dollars every single month in pure passive income and i don't do it i basically do nothing to promote it by the way if you have exams coming up check out my skillshare class it'll be

linked for free in the video description if you want to check it out but it's it's amazing how you can just do the work to make something once although in fairness i was creating study themed content on youtube for two years before i made that class so again it wasn't a get rich quick scheme it wasn't a get rich easy scheme but it was like a money tree that built up over time and has now helped pay the mortgage on my house so we've talked about the four different types of money tree but what mj

says in the book is that and what's obviously true is that it's not that easy to build one of these you don't just like magically have the abilities to do that and one of the ways that you can is lesson number four which is switch from being a consumer to being a producer now from a young age society broadly teaches us that we should be consumers and we should be thinking about what to buy you know our parents like you know johnny what do you want for your birthday what are you going to buy when

you get that oh you know what would you buy if you had a million dollars if you won the lottery it's all very much based on being a consumer but as mj tells us in the book this consumer mindset is never going to help us to actually build wealth instead we need to think to a producer mindset and this genuinely changes the way that you approach the world like if you think in the eyes of a consumer and you see like some cool product i was in samsung store earlier today it's fairly close to where

i live it's really cool i'm thinking as a consumer like bloody hell there's all these phones and watches and gadgets and fridges and microwaves and all this cool stuff and the store is really nice and i want a fancy new sofa because that's a fancy new sofa but if you have more of a producer mindset then you start thinking you can you kind of ignore the fact that there's all this stuff out there you can buy instead you start thinking oh this is an interesting interesting marketing play that they're doing i wonder how much it

cost to put the store together oh i wonder if i could make a video where i switch from iphone to samsung because there's so many samsung phones here so i can make a video where i talk about it and switch and then teach people what it's like to switch from an iphone to android all that kind of jazz and so the way i'm thinking there is hopefully as a producer rather than a consumer and if you want a practical tip for how this works like i think really the key is to just think about what's

going on on the business side of stuff when you are out and about for example the next time you're in mcdonald's instead of thinking how tasty your fellow fish burger is think huh i wonder how it is that mcdonald's created a system whereby every single fish burger and every single mcdonald's basically tastes the same how do they do that that's pretty incredible and then you can read a book like the e-myth revisited which is again one of my favorite business books of all time that talks about exactly how mcdonald's built this sort of franchise system

and lesson number five show commitment don't just show interest and this is a message that mj talks about throughout the book basically you know there's a difference between interest and commitment and if you want to get rich quick but not easy if you want to get rich quick you have to do things that other people are not willing to do or are not able to do and usually that shows commitment rather than just interest and there's a nice quote from the book where he says that interest works in your business one hour a day monday

through friday commitment works in your business seven days a week whenever time permits now when i was first growing this youtube channel and the personal brand in the business and everything i would spend basically every waking moment where i wasn't at work or at university or in lectures and stuff thinking and planning videos and planning content and figuring out the business strategy and like doing a lot of stuff and yes someone might look at that and think oh my god toxic productivity hustle culture and all that jazz but like you know you don't get to

a point where you build a successful business or a successful youtube channel all this kind of stuff you don't get to that point without putting in the hard hard work and my point is that the hard work does not have to be suffering it's hard but it but it doesn't have to it doesn't have to be painful it can be fun and i find ways to make it fun and that's like the subject of the book that i'm writing how to make things fun but it does take work and it is hard it's it's not

like an easy process and i think a lot of the kind of anti-productivity toxic hustle culture kind of zealots are they're sort of campaigning for like an easy chilled out life and that's totally fine if you want an easy chill out life 100 i'm not like i'm not gonna argue with you you do what you want but what mj says and what like you know these sorts of people like like if you care about building wealth in a short amount of time you can't take the easy route and have like a chilled out life you

do have to start being committed to the stuff that you're doing rather than just interested in it and there's so many people i know who've started youtube channels or businesses that are like oh you know i just want to do it for half an hour a day but okay that's fine you can do it for half an hour a day as a hobby but if you just do it for half an hour a day you are very unlikely to be successful which gets me in fairness it kind of depends on what your goals are if

you don't want to become a millionaire through this business whatever that's totally fine be chilled out about it but if you do if you want to follow the millionaire fastlane approach you have to be committed rather than just interested okay so we've talked about five of the different lessons and in fact like there's tons more like this is a very very dense book it looks i i actually read this on listen to this on audible so i didn't know how dense it was but actually it reads more like a sort of textbook rather than like

a storybook uh which is kind of nice like it's really really good would recommend amazon link in the video description but so we talked about five of the key lessons that i learned from this there's so many more but i want to talk about his five commandments for building a business now and his overall point on the book is that if you want to be on the millionaire fast lane you have to follow all five of these commandments you don't have to follow all five like dropping one or two could still make you rich but

it's just so much more likely for you to become a millionaire quickly i.e in under 10 years which is isn't that quick but quickly um if you follow all five of these commandments the first one is the commandment of need and he says that 90 of businesses fail within the first five years because they don't satisfy the commandment of need and the commandment of need is that people actually need to your the thing that you are offering like we have to create a business that provides value or solves people's needs or wants in some way

and if we're not it's really really hard to build a business based on something that tries to solve a problem that people don't actually have secondly we have the commandment of entry and the idea here is that you ideally want to build a business in a zone where the barrier for entry is high rather than low and the reason you want this is because a high barrier to entry means that it's very difficult for someone else to copy your business like for example if you or me decided we wanted to start the next amazon that's

really freaking hard there is a very high barrier to entry to starting the next amazon but if there's a business that looks easy to other people to start and there is a low barrier to entry like for example starting a youtube channel where the barrier to entry is low or starting a podcast where it's even lower starting a blog where it's even lower than that or starting a tick tock where it's even lower than that the lower the barriers to entry the more competitive the landscape becomes and actually one of the nice things i like

about youtube is that in this creator sphere youtube is still the thing that has the highest barrier to entry there is now like every year the bar for production value and quality and all this stuff rises and so for a newcomer to get into the youtube sphere they kind of need to have decent gear and decent equipment that's like oh and this takes us into a whole like controversial territory which i talk a lot about in my course the part-time youtuber academy so i'm not going to go into it here but basically i like youtube

because it has a higher barrier to entry than starting a tick tock or starting an instagram page for example the third one is the commandment of control and that's the idea that at every step of the process we want to be in control of the thing that we're trying to sell and if we don't control things like the price or the way it's managed or the way that's being sold then it's hard to build a business on that this is partly why building a business of just a youtube channel is very scary because it does

not fulfill the commandment of control because ultimately my business lives and dies by this youtube channel that's really scary that's really bad i am not fulfilling the commandment of control in in this business that i've got around the youtube channel and that's why when i make courses like my part-time youtube academy i try and fulfill the commandment of control by being in control of as much of that process as possible this is also why mlm multi-level marketing schemes don't work because like you if you're selling someone else's product who's also trying to get you to

sell someone else's product you ultimately don't really have the control over that process and therefore if stuff goes wrong or stuff is bad you personally can't really influence it and that's a very scary way to build a business commandment number four is the commandment of scale and that's the idea that we ideally if you want to grow rich quick the idea is you want to build a business that has the potential to scale up for example starting a barber shop and cutting people's hair for 10 pounds a pop is not a business that has very

much potential to scale unless you try and build up more and more and more barbershops and a change of barbershops but then that costs loads of money whereas a software business or a content business really does have the potential to scale so ideally you want to build a business that satisfies the common scale and there's another thing that he he talks about in the book that we haven't talked about in this video which is the law of affection basically the the law is that to make millions you have to impact millions uh and it's pretty

simple like if you want to make millions of youtube channel you have to be impacting millions of people if you want to make millions of business you have to be impacting millions of people or impacting fewer people but like with a very large amount of impact and so the commandment of scale kind of relates to that you can't get rich quick off of selling lemonade in your local neighborhood you have to build a business that has the potential at least for scale and finally we have the commandment of time now the idea here as we

talked about before is that you want to build a business where the value of the business is disconnected from your personal time input like if you have to show up every single day nine to five or whatever many hours to make your money then that's not really true wealth and that is actually one of the problems with this youtube business as much as great as the content business in i have to keep showing up time and time again to record videos like this one it's kind of fun i'm having a great time and i would

like to build a sort of business in the future one where i really don't have to show up at all to continue to do the work this is why writing a book is great because once you've written the book people just buy it assuming it's marketed well and assuming it's a good book of course all that all that fun stuff so that was a very very long summary of some of the lessons in this enormous really really good book millionaire fast lane would recommend if you're interested in more ideas on how to build how to

make money how to build passive income check out this video over here which is nine passive income ideas and it talks about how at the time i was making twenty seven thousand dollars a week from these passive income sources thank you so much for watching do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you in the next video bye