Money Lessons From The Book The Millionaire Fastlane

I didn't know what I didn't know about money until I heard about financial literacy. I had no idea it was thing. I was attending a three - day company self-development training when I was introduced to the concept and the facilitator recommended few financial books to start off with to learn more about the subject. Since then I have read quite a few financial books but this one "The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!" By M.J. DeMarco really stood out to me, it is the one of the books I come back to time and time again. This passage from Chapter 17, that I am about to share, was a bombshell, it had me all messed up in the head, it literally blew my mind, but let’s jump right to it.

Switching Teams and the Playbook

From the day you were born, you were baptized to play for Team Consumer, from the Barbie Doll and the Tonka Truck to the Star Wars action figures. You've been conditioned to demand: to want products, to need products, to buy products, and of course, to seek out the cheapest of those products.

The correlation between the Slowlane and the Sidewalk is this: Jobs exist to facilitate the consumer process. You become a brand manager for a consumer products company, you become an insurance agent, you become an accountant for some corporation-its consumer driven and focused to move goods and services into the hands of consumers. This “consumer” focus is like a gravitational pull to keep you amenable to anti-Fastlane thinking.

Cracking the Code

Decoding the Fastlane roadmap is as simple as joining the team that is custodian to the decryption key. The winning team is Team Producer. Reshape life's focus on producing, not consuming. When you reframe your thinking from majority thinking (consumer) to minority thinking (producer), you effectively switch teams and allegiances. Yes, become a producer first and a consumer second.

Applied, this means instead of buying products on TV, sell products. Instead of digging for gold, sell shovels. Instead of taking a class, offer a class. Instead of borrowing money, lend it. Instead of taking a job, hire for jobs. Instead of taking a mortgage, hold a mortgage. Break free from consumption, switch sides, and reorient to the world as producer.

I know; it's not easy. However, once you see the world from a producer perspective, your perception sharpens like a fine-tuned radio frequency, from static to clear stereo sound. Suddenly, opportunities have clarity, ideas surface, and scams are exposed. This new minority status is critical to strengthening your wealth creation temperament. Remember, the rich are a minority, and you want to be in that minority. It starts with a producer mindset.

Once you succeed as a producer, you can consume anything you want with little consequence because you'll be rich. To consume richly, produce richly first. Unfortunately, most people have it backward: consumption and no production. Producers get rich. Consumers get poor. Switch teams and reorient as a producer first, a consumer second. Make wealth attracted to you!

Be a Producer: Leverage the Business of a System

To switch teams and become a producer, you need to be an entrepreneur and an innovator. You need to be a visionary and a creator. You need to give birth to a business and offer the world value.

In this chapter, M.J. Demarco exhorts us to stop being consumers and start being producers. Instead of considering what to buy as so many of us have been conditioned to do, we should realize that our consumption attitude will never enable us to create generational wealth. Thinking from a producer mindset will help us change the way we look at the world. Adopting a producer mentality, will not only alter the way we perceive the environment we step in but also prompt us to think twice before making a purchase. There is constantly new, fancy, and cool stuff to buy, and this isn't about to change. However, instead of viewing them through the lens of a consumer, begin viewing them through the lens of a producer. Look at the marketing strategies employed by those businesses to persuade customers to purchase or why not research online the complaints made by their customers; if they are frequent and repetitive, perhaps you can create a better product to alleviate the pains those customers are feeling as a result of using those businesses' goods or services. When you are at KFC or Starbucks, consider the business side of such corporations while you are enjoying a meal or beverage and consider how they developed systems to deliver products of essentially the same quality repeatedly and all over the world within the same amount of time. In order to become accustomed to thinking in this manner, you must continually train your mind at this exercise. Who knows, you might come up with an absolutely brilliant business idea that people all around the world would learn about.

I will end this post with a quote with the hope that it will get you thinking and engaging in deep conversations with like-minded people: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind" ~ William James

Yours Truly,

The Queen Of Africa