The Millionaire Fastlane (6 page)

Your Speed (Part 8)
Speed is execution and your ability to go from idea to implementation. You could sit in a Ferrari on an empty, straight road, but if you fail to hit the accelerator, you fail to move. Without speed, your roadmap has no direction, your vehicle stands idle, and your road mutates into a dead end.

The Road Trip Is Paved with Toll Roads

Successful Fastlane travelers are warriors who live and die on rough roads. Toll roads pave the road to wealth, and that toll can't be paid on Easy Street. For some of us, this is good news because the toll weeds out the weak and escorts them to the land of normal. If you resist the toll, wealth will resist you. Unfortunately, some feel that wealth's toll can be paid by entitlements or certain “prerequisites,” such as:

• A functional family/good childhood
  
• “Hard work” versus “smart work”
  
• Educational accomplishments and credentials after your name
  
• A stellar business plan
  
• Venture capital
  
• Being a certain sex, color, or age
  
• Wishing, dreaming, and thinking positively
  
• Knowing the right people in the right places
  
• Attending the right schools
  
• Being passionate or "doing what you love" or "what you know"
  

Nothing is further from the truth.

The Millionaire Fastlane
doesn't care about these things. The Fastlane isn't a straight and smooth tree-lined street with white picket fences and children swinging on tires hanging from oak trees. It's a dark, deserted, unpaved road strewn with potholes that forces change and evolution. If the road trip to wealth were easy, wouldn't everyone be wealthy?

Expect a price to be paid. Expect risk and sacrifice. Expect bumps in the road. When you hit the first pothole (and yes, it will happen) know that you are forging the process of your unfolding story.
The Fastlane process demands sacrifices that few make, to resolve to live like few can.

The Road Trip Can't Be Outsourced to a Chauffeur

We live in a society that wants to outsource everything, from our household chores to raising our kids. Outsourcing might work for a dirty bathroom, but it doesn't work for wealth. Wealth's road trip has no chauffeur and the toll can't be outsourced to a virtual assistant in India.

Had someone gifted a Lamborghini to me (or any dream) when I was 16 years old, I can guarantee you I wouldn't be where I am today. When someone grants you your desires without you exerting any effort, you effectively handicap process. The person I needed to become would have been dwarfed because process would have been outsourced. There is no wisdom or personal growth gained in a journey that someone else does for you. The journey is yours.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• Wealth is a formula, not an ingredient.
  
• Process makes millionaires. Events are by-products of process.
  
• To seek a “wealth chauffeur” is to seek a surrogate for process. Process cannot be outsourced, because process dawns wisdom, personal growth, strength, and events.
  

CHAPTER 4: THE ROADMAPS TO WEALTH

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
~ Lewis Carroll

The Compass for Wealth

If you don't know where you are going, how will you know if you get there? If your destination is undefined, undoubtedly you'll never arrive and likely end in a place you don't want to be. Wealth is found with a roadmap, not a dartboard.

Self-made millionaires don't become millionaires by stumbling into money, just as financial failures don't become failures by stumbling into poorness. Both are the direct result of the financial roadmap chosen and the actions and beliefs that evolve from that roadmap. Your financial roadmap is definitive to process, and it's the first tool for your road trip to wealth.

Your current financial situation is a product of your existing roadmap, whether chosen or not. Your roadmap guides your actions, and the consequences of those actions have created your financial life. How your life unfolds is determined by your choices, and these choices originate from your belief systems, and those belief systems evolve from your predisposed roadmap.
If you want to change your life, change your choices
. To change your choices you must change your belief system. Your belief system is defined by your roadmap.

How do beliefs affect finances?

Beliefs preceded choices, which precede action. For example, if you believe “rich people got rich investing in mutual funds” your actions will reflect that belief. If some financial guru tells you to cancel your credit cards because “all debt is bad,” you do it. If an author says, “$50 invested today will be worth $10 million in 40 years,” and you believe it, your actions reflect that belief.

Beliefs are powerful mechanisms that drive action, whether true or not. Our parents said Santa Claus was real and we believed it. We left cookies, we looked out the window for the flying reindeer, and we wondered how he got his big butt down the chimney. We believe what we're taught until we gather evidence to the contrary.

Your belief system acts like a roadmap, a compass that, if errant, can lead you to a lifetime of detours. Fictitious beliefs are lying roadmaps; they escort you down dead-end roads where “Wealth: Next Exit” never happens.

The Three Financial Roadmaps to Wealth

Plotting your course to wealth and building your process starts with an examination of your current financial roadmap and the alternatives. There are three financial roadmaps:

1. The Sidewalk Roadmap
   
2. The Slowlane Roadmap
   
3. The Fastlane Roadmap
   

Within these three roadmaps lies a psychology, a belief system that dictates actions relative to each roadmap. More importantly, each roadmap operates within a “universe” governed by a mathematical “wealth equation.” Whatever roadmap you choose, your universe for wealth creation will abide by each map's respective wealth equation. Additionally, each roadmap is naturally predisposed toward a specific destination. Those predispositions are:

• The Sidewalk >- Poorness
  
• The Slowlane >- Mediocrity
  
• The Fastlane >- Wealth
  

Whichever financial roadmap you follow will predispose you to the destination inherent in the roadmap-the roadmap's “true essence.”

What is true essence?

If you play blackjack and win 15 consecutive hands, you violate the true essence of randomness. The natural state of randomness is to not deliver 15 wins in a row. When a wild African lion is tamed to perform in a Las Vegas magic act, the lion is trained to violate its true essence. The lion naturally wants to be wild, to hunt, to kill, to feed, to mate. The lion wants to revert to its natural self, which is why some flamboyant magicians get their heads bitten off. You have to be special to bend the laws of true essence.

Similarly, the roadmaps each possess a true essence that leads either to poorness, mediocrity, or wealth. For example, if you follow the Sidewalk, you'll likely end poor. While wealth is possible using any of the maps, finding it via a roadmap not predisposed to wealth is improbable.

Each roadmap contains key mindsets that act as signposts, or “mindposts,” that provide direction and guide actions, just like a roadmap. Those mindposts are:

Debt Perception:
Does debt control you or do you control your debt?

Time Perception:
How is your time valued and treated? Abundant? Fleeting? Inconsequential?

Education Perception:
What role does education have in your life?

Money Perception:
What is money's role in your life? Is money a tool or a toy? Plentiful or scarce?

Primary Income Source:
What is your primary means of creating income?

Primary Wealth Accelerator:
How are you accelerating your net worth and creating wealth? Or are you?

Wealth Perception:
How do you define wealth?

Wealth Equation:
What is your mathematical plan for accumulating wealth? What wealth equation defines the physics of your wealth universe?

Destination:
Is there a destination? If so, what does it look like?

Responsibility & Control:
Are you in control of your life and your financial plan?

Life Perception:
How do you live your life? Do you plan for the future? Forsake today for tomorrow? Or tomorrow for today?

The Roadmaps Operate within Distinct Universes

Each roadmap operates under a specific set of mathematical formulas,
the wealth equation
that determines the speed at which you can create wealth. Like Einstein's E=MC
²
, these formulas govern your wealth universe much like physics governs our universe. And because physics is bound by
mathematical absolutes
, so are your equations (and probabilities) to wealth.

The velocity of wealth acceleration evolves from your chosen roadmap's “universe,” and it is within these universes that your financial plan accelerates or stalls. Think of it as a railroad track, with each track having its own set of speeds, rules, and laws. You can hop aboard a track that allows speeds of 20 mph or speeds of 200 mph.

If you're unhappy in your financial situation, you can change your universe immediately by switching roadmaps. However, first, you have to understand the roadmaps to swap them. Let's dissect the three roadmaps in the next three parts of the Millionaire Fastlane: the Sidewalk, the Slowlane, and the Fastlane.

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• To force change, change must come from your beliefs, and your roadmap outlines those beliefs.
  
• Each roadmap is governed by a wealth equation and predisposed to a financial destination-Sidewalk to poorness, Slowlane to mediocrity, and the Fastlane to wealth.
  

PART 3:
Poorness–The Sidewalk

CHAPTER 5: THE SIDEWALK ROADMAP

When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, “I'm right, and everyone else is wrong.” That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time, an invitation to be attacked.
~ Larry Ellison

The Sidewalk Roadmap

Most people are lifelong Sidewalkers, followers of the Sidewalk Roadmap. The Sidewalk is the plan most followed,
a contract for a pleasurable today in lieu of a more secure tomorrow.

A Sidewalker exists in a state of one-something-from-broke: One album failure from broke. One business deal from broke. One gig from broke. One layoff from broke. On the Sidewalk, you're always “one something” from being homeless, bankrupt, or back living in your parent's basement.

Yes, some Sidewalkers actually earn large incomes, but none of them ever obtains true wealth. Don't let the contradiction fool you. The Sidewalk doesn't have an exit ramp to wealth-only a “DEAD END” sign signaling impending doom. The Sidewalker's road trip is a financial treadmill with a destination that typically ceases at bankruptcy or a crisis of reckoning.

What Is a Sidewalker?

A Sidewalker's financial destination doesn't exist.
The plan is to have no plan
. Surplus money is immediately spent on the next great gadget, the next trip, the next newer car, the next fashionable styles, or the next hot fad. Sidewalkers are carelessly trapped in a “Lifestyle Servitude” fed by an urgent, insatiable need for pleasure, image, and instant gratification. This perpetuates a cascading cycle that spins faster every month, increasing the velocity of the burden, forever enslaving the Sidewalker to their job or their business.

The Sidewalk is the road most traveled because it's the path of least resistance. Its siren song is instant gratification, and money is a hot potato that's quickly exchanged for the latest fix of the day. Want to witness how Sidewalkers live and think? Watch the television show Judge Judy for a few hours. Daughters suing moms for $100, people denying responsibility, consequence ignorance, people wanting rent for free. Seriously, the show should be renamed Life from the Sidewalk.

The Mindposts of a Sidewalker

The Sidewalker's roadmap contains behavioral characteristics that drive the Sidewalker's actions. These mindsets are signposts, or “mindposts” that guide the Sidewalker through life.

Debt Perception:
Credit allows me to buy things now! Credit cards, consolidation loans, car payments-these supplement my income and help me enjoy life today! If I want it now, I'm going to get it now
.

Time Perception:
Time is abundant and I spend money like there's no tomorrow. Heck, I could be dead in two weeks, and you can't take it with you!

Education Perception:
I finished school when I graduated, hooray!

Money Perception:
If you got it, flaunt it! Why save for a rainy day? I spend every dime I earn and most of my bills are paid on time; isn't that being fiscally responsible?

Primary Income Source:
Whatever gig pays the most is what I will do. I chase money baby! It's all about the Benjamins!

Primary Wealth Accelerator:
Net worth? I hit the casino, I buy lottery tickets, and I have an active lawsuit against an insurance company … does that count?

Wealth Perception:
He who dies with the most toys wins!