26. MJ DeMarco: The Great Rat Race Escape (How To Go From Wage Slavery to Wealth)
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Reader's Journey podcast. Today we have MJ DeMarco, author of The Great Rat Race Escape. MJ, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Hey Alex, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man.

So MJ, you start the book by talking about the script. So for anyone that isn't familiar with your books, can you explain what that is? Sure. The script is a prescribed way of living and it's pretty much enforced by culture and society. And it's basically unquestioned, you know, because your parents subscribe to the script, the media subscribes to the script.

You know, to put the script in a nutshell, it's, you know, you go to school, you go to college, you get a degree, no matter of the economics behind the degree, you know, the job forecasts, you work for 40 or 50 years and then you retire at 65. However, if you're a good investor and a good saver, maybe you can retire at 55.

So the script encompasses everything from education to the media and to even financial advice. And it is just it is the prescribed way of living that is promoted on every media outlet you see today. Right.

Right. And yeah, you have this great line in your book where you say, if you follow conventional wisdom, you'll get conventional results. So it's hard to be, you know, unique if you just follow what everyone else is doing, which is essentially following the script.

Exactly. Conventional wisdom from conventional people living conventional lives is going to get you a conventional life. And so one of the things like, you know, I've heard all my life and a lot of other people and you kind of mentioned is that if you save and you invest your money, you know, hopefully you'll be able to retire 65, maybe even 55. And but you actually dispel this myth of like what compound interest could what it can do and what it can't do. So I was hoping if you could kind of dive, dive more into that.

Sure. And this is where a lot of readers of mine are like, what? What? You're going against compound interest? And my my, I don't want to say refusal, but my objection to compound interest is not that the math is doesn't work. It actually does.

It's because compound interest requires huge sums of money, which if you have a job, you can acquire huge sums of money. And the other variable in compound interest is time. And once again, we are limited by our mortal limits, which typically is about 70, you know, 78 years old or something. You know, actually, it's a lot younger than that because time.

You know, we start to, you know, I was just telling you before the podcast that, you know, I like to try to ski, but right now I can't do it because I just got out of a move that really was rough on my body. So I can't really try to ski in the next month or so. I'm going to have to recover. So.

compound interest fatal flaw is number one is you don't have 300 years to save money. And number two is it requires a huge sum of cash in order to be mildly effective. So in order to get that huge sum of cash, you have to do things differently. You can't be going at a job or, you know, today the latest high

hot thing is, you know, fire or financial independence, retire early, which is basically you want to live like a miser. You want to go, you know, live in a tent by the river and you don't want to spend any money and you want to save everything.

So one day you can retire young, you know, living that same type of frugal, miserly existence. And that's just redefining terms to suit a narrative. That's not financial freedom. If you can't

Go to a restaurant two, three times a week because that's what you want to do. You're not financially free. If you can't go replace your ratty shoes because you can't afford them because your saving regimen is so regimented, you can't go buy those things. You're not financially free. There's a difference between financial freedom and time freedom.

So a lot of these people, they're saying they're financially free, which they're not, but they're time free. They can do whatever they want as long as it doesn't involve money. So I say my response to that is, well, you know, a bum living on the street has time freedom. They can do whatever they want as long as it doesn't involve money. And that is not a way to live. That is absolutely not a way to live.

Yeah, and what I really liked about your book is you talk more about generating wealth and creating. That's the whole point of starting a business, to create wealth so that you could get rich while you're young. Meanwhile, all these other books focus on saving and investing and waiting 40 years to get rich. I think that's why your book is so appealing. You also mention when it comes to compound interest, one thing no one ever talks about is inflation, how 40 years from now, your money is going to be worth a lot less.

than what it is today. So that's another, like, and you also have this great point about these, I believe you call them champagne hypocrites, like people that sell you the long-term investing game, but meanwhile, they're rich from selling books, courses, and other products. So it's all this like misinformation that you really kind of, you really kind of share the truth in your book, which I really enjoyed.

Sure. Some of the some of the most richest people that preach this actually don't follow it. They got rich because they follow what I call a fast lane model. You know, they they impact millions of people. Hence, they make millions of dollars. And, you know, it's just it's mind blowing that more people follow.

I keep hearing people, oh, he's a millionaire. A millionaire means nothing today because of inflation. I mean, I'm sorry. That doesn't impress me. You're a millionaire? Okay. So is everyone that lives in my city. And they live in nice little middle class houses and whatnot. But because of inflation, a millionaire today means absolutely nothing. It doesn't make you rich. It doesn't make you financially free. It just means you're doing pretty good. Right.

Right. Yeah. So, MJ, if compound interest and like, you know, investing, saving for 40 years isn't the secret to escaping the rat race. Can you tell us like what is and like maybe how you escape the rat race? Sure. It's leveraged entrepreneurship. And with the Internet today, you know, since the Internet has been born, I don't know, was it 20, 25 years old or something? Yeah.

More millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires have been made because the Internet has the fantastic ability to create the mathematical structure to get rich fast. And I'm talking when I say get rich fast, I'm talking two, five, 10 years. So you don't have to sit around and go to a job 40 years and save 10 percent of your paycheck and do all that BS that pretty much sacrifices your youthful life.

in exchange for some elderly retirement. So don't mistake that for, oh, you need to go start an internet business. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying the internet is a great channel to leverage the mathematics available to you where you can scale a business. Instead of serving three, four, five, 10 customers a day, you can serve 100 a day, 1,000 a day. This is what makes leveraged entrepreneurship the most effective

effective way to create wealth in today's culture. And, you know, I subscribe to a lot of business for sale websites where they, you know, people are selling their businesses and you wouldn't believe some of the stuff that's on there. It's like, well, this was started two years ago and they want $4 million for it. This was started five years ago. They want $11 million for it. Okay. You're not going to build that kind of wealth

anywhere in the stock market, even when the stock market's at all-time highs right now. There's no comparison. So in The Great Rat Race Escape, the book I just wrote, a common term I use is called asymmetrical returns. And that's what leveraged entrepreneurship gives you the ability to do is to generate asymmetrical returns. I started my business with $900.

And I turned it into a seven figure empire. I did that actually twice. OK, you're not going to get that anywhere. So that's asymmetrical return. So when you start a business, even if it's something that seems, I don't know, you know, obscure or obtuse.

You can turn that into some kind of powerful entity where you could sell it for asymmetrical returns or generate an income. Instead of making $5,000 a month, you're making $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month. And that's the power of asymmetrical returns. Ultimately, wealth comes down to mathematics.

And compound interest is effective when time is removed from the equation, but we can't remove time. So that's why becoming a entrepreneur, specifically what I call fast lane entrepreneurship, is the best way.

to generate wealth quickly. Right. Yeah. Especially with the internet today is so much easier to start a business, build a successful business. And we see all the time today, especially on Twitter, it's like, oh, I just started my company. I raised this much money or I sold it for this much money. And just pretty crazy to see how fast companies are able to grow today with the internet. Yeah. And...

That's not me saying, oh, you need to be you need to go to, you know, Silicon Valley and join the startup culture. No, no, no, no. There are a lot of just millions of people who have these empires that are just, you know, they have three, four employees and they're bringing in six figures a month profit. You know, I just had a friend over this week and he.

He spent the last week with me and I didn't see him working at all, but he's making six figures a month because he's set up a fast lane type of business that can generate this, these types of returns and give you some freedom too. So you're not always managing the business, you know, so that's, that's what's available today. And instead we have too many people just

They're just lost. They you know, too many authors and gurus and coaches are just selling these fairy tales and fantasies of, oh, you can follow your passion and everything will just fall in line and you'll get rich. And, you know, the marketplace chews them up and spits them out. And reality is much different. Right.

Right. Yeah, I think you have a great line in your book. It's like opinions don't matter. Only cash does. Like what people are willing to pay for, that's what matters. Not what someone's opinion is.

Sure. Absolutely. When someone buys your product, they're actually voting. Money is a vote. Right. So for anyone listening, let's say they're 21 today or maybe like what advice would you give them or maybe what advice do you give your own kids? Like should they, you know, try to start their own business? Should they try to go work for someone or like, you know, what kind of path do you kind of advise young people today?

Well, there's nothing wrong with getting a job. If you have a long-term vision of being an entrepreneur, there's nothing wrong with getting a job, just so you know it's a means to an end. For me, I had many jobs when I was a struggling entrepreneur, and it was to pay the bills, and it was to fund my entrepreneurial ventures. So there's no failure in getting a job. It's just once you understand the Fastlane strategy,

A job should have no place in that equation unless it is just to do what I said, you know, to pay your bills and

Also, you can get domain experience in a job. A lot of businesses are started with the experience you find in a job. You see needs. You see problems in your company that you're working for. That's actually how my first business was started was because I was in a job I hated, but I saw a need in that particular industry, which compelled me to start my first successful business. So there's no failure in getting a job, but

Ultimately, you want to start a, what I call a fast lane venture, which subscribes to a bunch of commandments that make it possible to generate exponential wealth or asymmetrical returns. And that's what I call the SENSE framework. It's my proprietary litmus test, my framework for starting a business. SENSE stands for control, entry, need, time, and scale. The SENSE framework, if your business wants

ultimately meets all those commandments, it's a good opportunity and it can make you phenomenally wealthy in a short period of time.

Yeah. And I want to continue diving more into your book and talk about a couple of quotes that really stuck out to me. And one is this. You say passive income is for amateurs. Polymorphic pay is for professionals. Because I think people are kind of have this belief that they just need to generate passive income and that will help them, you know, build wealth and like riches. Can you explain what you mean by polymorphic pay?

Sure, passive income is another victim of the guru madness and coaching madness that we see everywhere on the Internet today. Is everyone wants passive income? Yeah. Well, sort of. Why? I want to win the lottery, too. But those people, what ultimately they don't realize is the pathway to passive income is very not passive. It is it is very active income.

It took me years to generate passive income. Even my business right now, which is just a simple publishing company, it took me years to get that to a state of passive income. So when someone's talking about passive income, usually they have a warped sense of expectation about what that is. For them, that means, hey, I'm going to spend $1,000.

10 days or 10 days, that's actually being too liberal. How about 10 hours? I'm going to spend 10 hours writing this bad book. I'm going to throw it up on Amazon and I'm going to have passive income. OK, and then they learn they made one dollar.

for the next year. Okay. That's not passive income. That's what I'm talking about is that's for the amateurs. Polymorphic pay is for the professionals. Polymorphic pay is just like passive income, but that means you're not only earning money, you're earning time. And

Only a fast lane business that follows the sense commandments usually meets those criteria. Like I said, I had my friend over this last week. He wasn't working a lot, but he was making money. He was enjoying polymorphic pay because he was making money as he was shooting basketball at the house, as he was laying in the sun, whatever he was doing, he was making money. So polymorphic pay is something that's going to take you probably decades

months, maybe even a couple of years. But once that structure is created, it's almost a set it and forget it, as long as you have the employees and the systems behind it. So that's the difference. Passive income is this illusion that people think is very easy. And the people that want that easy passive income aren't willing to put in the effort to create what is really what they're looking for is probably more pay.

Yeah, and that was just one of the few myths I really enjoyed that you kind of dispel in the book. And it was just like, yeah, one point after another, especially the polymorphic pay. It's not just you create one product today and you kind of enjoy the royalty from it forever. It's like when you talk about writing your first book, it took you a while to write, and you still get royalty checks from that today. But you did have to put in all that upfront work, and it's only paid off years later. Sure, and there was a business system behind it, too. And the business system...

It took me years and years to cultivate as well. I have a business form, a Fastlane form. That wasn't just started in a number of hours. That took me years to cultivate. That was part of the business system. So people are just looking for shortcuts. And whenever I hear someone mention passive income,

That tells me that their mind is not right. They have the wrong expectations. Because if you're getting into, you want to be an entrepreneur because I want passive income, you're going to fail. And it's, for me, it's a red flag that you're just, you're not in the right mindset to have success. Right. And I just want to, actually, the next quote I want to talk about is something you just touched upon, which is, you have this quote that says, the largest industry in the world is the business of shortcuts.

So can you talk more about that? Sure. Everyone wants a shortcut. And the problem people have with results and success is that they work hard, but they're working hard to find a shortcut. They're not working hard on the actual process themselves.

that delivers the results. It's like losing weight. The actual process to lose weight is to eat right and to exercise. Okay, eating right happens all day. Exercise, you have to do that daily. These are daily processes. But no, what they do is they look hard, they work hard to look for the shortcut. Well, let me try this pill.

Well, let me try this new diet. Let me try this. Let me try that. Let me, hey, how about you just eat right and you exercise? So entrepreneurship has the same thing. Hey, if I buy this affiliate course and I can sell this affiliate course, I'm going to make millions. Hey, if I just sign up and sell T-shirts, you know, I can sell T-shirts, drop ship them from anywhere in my house. It's wonderful. I just signed this paper and I'm in business.

Okay, that's a shortcut. The only people that are making money in the shortcuts are the people selling the shortcuts. So if you can sell a shortcut that actually is somewhat of a shortcut, somewhat effective, you're going to do well because the business of shortcuts, that's pharmaceuticals. Everyone wants to take a pill and get better. Well, how about like I have people in my family that have diabetes? Well, all they want to do is take pills. They don't want to change their diet.

So, and that's what I'm saying. That's what I say is the business of shortcuts is the biggest industry out there. And it's a, it's a, you know, if you want to sell a shortcut, that's a great place to be for business, assuming your shortcut works.

Yeah, and that was just really another eye-opening moment where it's like people that look for shortcuts kind of end up just taking the wrong path and it actually takes them like longer to get the results they want where they think, oh, just swallowing pills will help me. But the truth is you have to, you know, focus on diet and exercising if you want to improve your health. So that was just a really great point. I really enjoyed in the book. Yeah, I just do the work and quit working hard for the shortcut. And that was my story.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was working hard, but I was working hard to find the shortcut. So I was buying stupid stuff on the TV and it just wasn't effective. Right. So MJ, for anyone that wants to build like a legitimate business, you know, they're willing to do the work. And I'm sure you met a lot of entrepreneurs in your forums and you talk with them all the time. How do you go about like maybe realizing a business opportunity or kind of deciding what kind of business to start? Any advice to share there? Yeah.

Sure. I think there's this myth or illusion that, you know, hey, to start a business, you need something totally unique and novel, you know, something that's never been seen before, never been done before. And that's simply not true. Entrepreneurship is mainly just improving something. And the term I use in my books is value skew.

Ultimately, every time you buy something, you're buying it because there's something that intrigued you to say, hey, you know what, I'm going to buy this one.

So that is a value. So you could have bought something because the label was nicer or the story that the company said that why they were in business was intriguing to you and it matched with your identity. It could be the customer service. You had someone that you dealt with before buying that was very nice. And, OK, I'm going to use that even though they're more expensive. So all these things are value skews.

And for everyone, it's different. So you may buy something because you had a great customer service experience. Someone else may buy something because they liked the way the story was behind the company that matched with their identity. Another person may buy because they had a feature they were looking for. All these are value skews. So the more skewing of value you do that is better or observably better from the competition,

That's a business. So if you have one or two value SKUs that are better than the competition and it's discernible by your audience, that's a business. That simply is business. And even today, marketing could be a value SKU. You can have the exact same product as your competitor, but you're a better marketer. You put a better frame on it. You put a better brand on it.

That's a skew that will cause money to flow to your company. So starting a business is not about reinventing something or disrupting an industry. Sure, disruption is great. But for people that have no interest in being the next Jeff Bezos, people that want, hey, I want to live free. I want to live richly. I want to live in the house I want. I want to do what I want.

These are the opportunities we have available to us. You don't need to be the next Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs and be on the front page of Forbes to live this type of lifestyle. And I can tell you, I'm living proof of that.

Yeah, it's great to know you don't have to like disrupt the whole industry or like start a complete new business. Like if there's an existing business, that means there's already demand for it. There's customers there. And as long as you could just provide a better product or service, like chances are your business will be successful and like improve your quality of life.

Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So I want to kind of shift now to maybe advice for more like people who are already entrepreneurs and you have this great lesson. You call it the desert of desertion. And it talks about how like when you are starting a business, it could get pretty difficult and it's kind of like your motivation falls down. And it's like this rite of passage that all entrepreneurs take. And I guess my question is like, how do you know when you're just in the desert versus if you're just in a bad business?

That's an age-old question. Basically, you're going to have to look at the feedback you're getting because sometimes no feedback is not valid feedback. It's a very complicated issue in that you could have a great product, but your messaging is off or you're not reaching the right market or you haven't framed it well enough. So you have a great product, you're just failing elsewhere.

So there's a, I call it relative value triangulation. And you can write a book on that itself. But that determines if you're actually dealing with, hey, this product we have here, this offer, this service here, this is a failure. We need to cancel it. We need to move on to something else. That ultimately is a test is basically you want to see if your offer is proper.

If you're reaching the right audience, if you reached enough of your audience and if all those come back is, yeah, you know, we have branded this right. We have framed it properly. We have targeted the right audiences. We have reached enough of those audiences. We've have we have enough data.

And if it's still that there's nothing going on there, then it might be time to say, you know what, this this is not working. So the actual process of getting out of that to say, hey, you know, we need to keep chugging it because you have to get that data to see whether if you're failing in any of those lynch points. It's like and I did talk about this in the book is it's very much like the scientific method.

is you change one variable, you test, you change another variable, you test, you change another variable, you test. So the process, when all that is happening and you get no sales, that's the desert of desertion. And that's when you say, oh my God, why did I start this business? This is so hard. This isn't working. And that's the point where most people quit. And again,

They're not quitting because they tested all the right variables. They're quitting because simply there's no feedback. So you want to keep acting until you get to the feedback loop, which ultimately is a sale. Ultimately is some type of feedback. Hey,

I don't understand your product. Hey, your product sucks. You know, something, some kind of data where you can formulate a conclusion on. But that desert of desertion, pretty much everyone goes through it. And you have to be aware of it because that's the point where most people fail and give up too early. Hmm.

Right. Yeah. I think if you read any like biography or autobiography book by famous businessmen, they'll talk about how they started this business and they always had like a brink of failure. Like you hear about Elon Musk where he almost had to shut down Tesla and SpaceX because he didn't get funding for it. And then at the last minute, he got like funding for both companies.

So just pretty interesting how you kind of set that framework and just give people like a heads up. If you're going to start a business, you're going to have to go through the desert and just be ready for that. Yeah, a lot of times it's two steps back and three steps forward. So when people are taking those two steps back, they're like, oh, I quit. Little did they know the three steps forward was next.

And so continuing down this path of like a device for current entrepreneurs, uh, you also have this great line where you want to buy a cornbread before buying champagne. Uh, can you explain what you, what you mean by that? Sure. Uh,

Once the company starts to grow, especially for new entrepreneurs, when they're unfamiliar with, oh, my God, you know, I made three thousand dollars a month in my job and now I'm making thirty thousand dollars a month in my business.

they're not familiar with that type of money and they start buying stuff, what I call champagne expenses. Hey, I'm going to get the big mahogany desk. I'm going to start flying first class. I'm going to, you know, buy the expensive, you know, chair. I'm going to, you know, all the expenses go up and, you know, I'm going to get the big office in class A space in the high rise and

Yeah, there's a time and place for that, but it's not when you're growing. You want to leave that to the point where maybe you get funded.

And they want to look a certain way or you sell the business because all that money you're earning could be could be put into your own retirement. I don't say retirement, but your own financial freedom of doing whatever you want. So there's a time you want to everything you want to put everything you want to spend in your growing business has to impact the bottom line.

I'm going to spend $1,000 right now. Is this going to generate $2,000? Is this going to generate more sales, more revenue, more customers? Is this going to impact the bottom line? If it does, then it's a cornbread expense. The mahogany desk is not going to improve your sales. It may make you feel pretty good and feel pretty successful, but it's

That's when you're growing and you're trying to scale a business, all cash is the cash you want to generate into cornbread expenses, things that are going to move the needle. Because I guarantee you, if you sell your business for $42 million, you can buy the mahogany desk.

And you can do whatever you want. You can take two years off and do I mean, the whole world opens up to you. So that's there's a time and a place for that. And and follow the principles and you'll get there. And believe me, it's it's more rewarding when you truly can afford that stuff as opposed to trying to maintain an image or something.

Yeah, and just a great mindset to have. If you're going to spend money, make sure you're spending it to grow the business and investing in the business, not just some materialistic thing like a mahogany desk like you mentioned. Yeah. So MJ, I want to ask two questions. Being a multimillionaire, I guess the first is, is it true that your net worth is your net worth? Absolutely, I would say that because who you hang out with,

really impacts. I mean, if you hang out with a bunch of people who just want to spend everything they earn, you know, they're complaining about all rich people and rich people are thieves and ultimately that's how you're going to think. So you definitely want to surround yourself with people with larger goals, things, people that support and inspire you. And,

Like I said, I had a friend over this weekend and we're both business owners, making six figures a month and whatnot. And it's interesting when you're with someone that is in the same frame of view and then you step out of that and then you hear someone, you go to the softball team and you hear them complaining about how their boss cut their hours and their job sucks. And it's like,

It's and you think yourself, you know, it doesn't need to be that way. But that's that's the script. That's what they follow. And it takes it takes some mental fortitude to be able to say, you know, I'm not going to live my life that way because you don't need to. If you just step outside of that and follow the right type of get out of the system. And instead of being in the system, you start actually serving the system.

Yeah, I think that's why your first book, The Millionaire Fastlane, was such a big hit because it showed people another path in life. You don't have to follow the script. There are ways that you can legally get rich while you're young and build a successful business that helps people by providing great product or service.

So that's wonderful to hear. And I guess the second question is like, does money really buy happiness? Like have you noticed like the more money you made in life, the happier you become? Or was it like a certain limit or a certain part like once you entered like this bracket, it's like kind of been the same ever since? Money definitely can buy happiness. But yeah, there is a certain limit there. Like if I want a million dollars,

my happiness would not change. I'm already, I'm already happy. I'm actually, I pinch myself every morning. I mean, I live in a huge house, beautiful view,

And, you know, I have everything I need, everything I want. I have virtually no debt unless it's debt. I namely instituted myself because the money was cheaper, practically free. I mean, I pinched myself every morning, but it gets it got that way because I've accumulated enough wealth to

to live this lifestyle. And I can write books that are, you know, triggering to some people and may not be viable, economically viable to the mainstream. I can do that because I'm not working for working for money any longer. I'm working for myself. I'm working for my own passions.

which is beautiful is because now I can follow my passion and not have to worry about pissing people off or making, Oh, I need to make the mortgage next month. And I got to write something that everyone will like. I don't have to do that anymore. But all that is because I've accumulated enough wealth for that. But yes, there is a limit. Um,

Like I said, I could win a million dollars and my life would absolutely change nothing. Nothing would change. So I've reached that particular threshold. And believe me, it's a lot bigger than what the media will say. I think the media says, OK,

Oh, you only need to make $70,000 a year or something. It's something ridiculous. I'm like, get the freak out of here. That's ridiculous. That's just they're just promoting a narrative that, hey, you can live a mediocre life and be happy. Or the new thing today is you can own nothing and be happy. That's what they're trying to promote now. But money generates freedom.

See, people who are who are wealthy and don't have freedom are usually miserable because they're subject to maybe they work 90 hours a week. Maybe they're they're lynched to a business with hundreds of employees and they haven't really found out how to get away from it.

Or maybe they're in a bad relationship with somebody they married 20 years and they've diverged apart. So there's all these uncontrollable forces there in their life. But if you if you spend money to earn your freedom, money definitely can influence happiness.

Yeah, and that seems to be like a common like answer among people who have been like really successful in life is like, it's not just like money buys you freedom, it buys you like options, and you can kind of pursue and spend your time however you want. So that seems to kind of be the biggest benefit. And being and like, that's what actually brings you happiness. And like having a lot of money is just a result of that, but not like the end goal, per se.

Yeah, and that's the issue I have with the fire movement is they're telling you, oh, you can be happy with no money. You know, just don't eat out or don't travel to that exotic vacation or don't stay in that five-star hotel or don't rent those jet skis or don't eat that gourmet meal or don't do this, don't do that. Okay, that's not financial freedom. Okay, that's time freedom. That's not financial freedom. So, yeah.

I promote both. I promote financial freedom and time freedom because I guarantee you it's just like I said, I pinch myself every day and I tell myself, you know what? I can I can show people how to do this and I can show them for 10 bucks. I don't sell. I don't sell seminars. I don't sell coaching programs. I don't sell anything.

five figure ticket big ticket seminars and coaching and you know all these things that people do nowadays hey if what you have is so valuable why do you need to sell it for twenty thousand dollars you know if you're already rich you're already wealthy why do you need to sell for twenty thousand dollars it makes no sense so everything i sell and teach is

is available in a $10 book. And I'm not selling anyone else on anything else. There's nothing I can sell you after you read my book. Yeah, that's one of the biggest reasons I love reading books because you get like, you know, deck is a wisdom by just paying $10 and you could like read the book and like learn basically everything that person has learned.

And speaking of books, you have, you mentioned you have one of the chapters where you talk about people always ask you like, what's like the best book to read? Or like, how do you decide what books should people read? And you have what you call like the right book strategy. So can you kind of explain like how you decide what book to read next? Sure. The right book strategy means the next book you should read is the book that will solve the problem that you're facing. Okay. And what happens is a lot of people, they just read books for the sake of reading books.

They're accumulating knowledge, but they're not doing anything with that knowledge. So they end up becoming knowledgeable, all sorts of different things. You know, oh, how Jeff Bezos started or how this guy entrepreneur started. They have all this ancillary knowledge, but they do absolutely nothing with it. OK, so that's that's what I call an action fake. You're doing things to make yourself feel good.

more accomplished. You want to feel like you're making progress, but you're actually doing nothing. Okay. So the right book strategy is basically once you start building a business,

skewing value, solving problems, all these problems are gonna come up in front of your face. So the problem that you're facing that is right in front of you that's stopping you from moving, progressing, that's the book you wanna read. So if you start a business and hey, we got a great product, but nobody's buying, and you think maybe it's your branding. So read a branding book or okay,

You're not converting. I'll read a book on book funnel. Okay. Read marketing, read this. Oh, okay. Now we need to hire, read a book on hiring good employees. So read the book. That's going to progress you along the path and, and get away from the action faking and reading books that, you know, Hey, this is a great book. I'm just going to read it and do nothing with it. Um, that's, that's, that's not moving the needle. Right. And such a great tip. Uh,

It's like you want to read what you could kind of implement immediately or in the near future, and that book will be a lot more impactful than just someone saying, hey, this book really, that was a great read. You know, you should read that. It's like you don't just want information. You want information that you could actually apply today, and that's like the best book for you. Yeah, and I get a lot of that. Hey, MJ, I read your books. What book should I read next?

There's no book you should read next. The next book you should read is the one that compels you to solve the problem from the business you're going to be starting. Right. Yeah, such a great tip. So, MJ, in addition to all the business advice you give in your book, I really enjoyed this part where you share also relationship advice and you have the 1-2-3 marriage strategy. So for all the entrepreneurs out there, could you explain what that rule is?

If you're if you're thinking about getting married with someone, there's a series of series of tests you want to be able to go through with that partner. The one, two, three strategy outlines them. Basically, you want to spend one hour talking with them about the things that ultimately tear relationships apart. And that is politics, religion, religion.

You know, fitness advice, you know, things like that. These are the types of things that people, they diverge away from each other and they end up getting divorced.

You'd be amazed at how many people get married and they don't even know the politics of their partner. They don't know their philosophy on religion. They don't know, you know, hey, hey, I'm vegan or, you know, I love killing deer in the in the in the for it. I mean, they don't even know this stuff. So you want to spend an hour talking to your partner about that stuff. The two is you want to I believe is you want to spend at least.

two days with your partner in the most horrific of conditions. For me and my partner, it was we spent two days in Belize in an airport that was shut down. We were shuttled to a different hotel that was infested with cockroaches. It was just a nasty experience. So you want to be put in a situation with your partner where you see each other at your worst.

That way you can really, really see them as, I don't want to say as they are, but in their worst of times, how do they handle it? Are they screaming and embarrassing you or doing something? Are they just happy-go-lucky? Well, we'll deal with it. And then the three is you want to date at least three years because in three years you'll be able to expose these other things.

You also be able to see if they were telling the truth. Oh, yeah, I'm vegan. But hey, you know, here you are eating a steak. So that way, you'll be able to see, you know, have they changed in those three years? Because a lot of people change. So are you changing with them in those three years? Have you diverged apart in those three years?

So you do all those things, I can guarantee you're going to have a pretty good marriage. Yeah, I love it. How just so simple to remember, like spend one hour discussing these topics, spend two days in like a bad situation and then spend three years really getting to know them. And it's just like great ways to kind of like, you know, that or see how compatible you are with someone. Because like you say, like a marriage could be like the biggest investment or biggest expense you ever make in your life. So it's very important and that you take the time.

And there's no rush. I mean, if they're as great as you think they are, they will be as great as they are three years from now. There's no rush.

So, MJ, in your book, you know, you have 120 kind of like wealth building strategies. I know we only covered a few today. Is there one or two that really kind of stick out to you or that look like kind of your favorite ones that you just want to share with the audience? I like the observed modeling principle, which is actually a strategy, not a principle. And that is where trade secrets hide in plain sight.

And that means if you just observe someone's process, you can get their secrets. A good example is if you're thinking about buying a marketing program, you don't need to buy the marketing program. Just do it. Just study what they how they sell that marketing program. If you said if you study how they sell that marketing program, you won't need to buy it. All you have to do is mimic what they're doing. There's their secret. For me, I remember.

When I owned my ground transportation company, I would look at Expedia and Travelocity. I would look at their homepage and I would say, look how this is designed. Because I guarantee you, they had UI, user interface experts on staff earning $80,000 a year studying the best user interface.

So I knew whatever it was front facing was what their data said, hey, this is the best, most converting structure, design structure that we can use. So just by looking at that, you can get data that says this is the best strategy to use. So there's stuff like that.

through all you know business is you just observe what successful people are doing and you can obsess their best practices and their best principles it's like on facebook if you see the same ad over and over and over and over again you can deduce they're making some good money so all you have to do is look okay what is their marketing strategy there what's the picture what's the copy what's this so a lot of these things are free all you have to do is be a good observer

Another strategy I like is the win-win strategy, where you try to find a third party who can benefit from a partnership or a joint venture where the outcome is a win-win in the book. I don't know if you got that far yet, but there's, excuse me, the great rat race escape.

It's actually a full-length novel with the principles and strategies embedded inside. In that particular story, they deployed the win-win strategy to get to a trade show that they could not afford. And that's a great way of solving problems is to use that strategy to see if there's another party you can co-opt with to solve a mutual problem. And that was that one. Let's see what else.

the cost of money strategy, where is you, you basically say to yourself, hey, affordability is not based on, you know, how much loan can I get? It's how cheap is the money? For example, I actually just took a mortgage, believe it or not, I took a mortgage, you want to know why I took a mortgage? Because the money was 2%. Okay, that money is free. So

While I could have paid cash for my house, I chose to take a small mortgage because I said, hey, you know what? That money is free and I'm going to take it.

So, again, I took that loan based on the cost of money, not because, oh, gee, that's the most I can afford or I need this mortgage in order to afford this. That's not how I think. I don't think that I don't use debt as a function of affordability. I use debt as a function of the cost.

uh just point you made earlier yeah in addition to all like the wealth building strategies you have and principles in the book you also have this entire uh story so you kind of bring people or readers along uh telling teaching them and also kind of providing the story of as an example so they could see like how it works uh so that's a big um a big unique uh aspect of the book that i really enjoyed as well great great to hear yeah it's a it's a it's a unique book and

I mean, it's been done before, but it's kind of rare to have a full-length story. And then you have – it's a mix of nonfiction and fiction. Right. So, MJ, I want to be respectful of your time. So I want to ask my closing question. And I'm not going to ask what book should people read next. But I do want to know, has there been one or two books that have had a huge impact on your life just personally? Yeah.

Yes, but they're not business books. You still want to hear them? Yeah, that's totally fine. The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and The Surrender Experiment by also Michael Singer. The Surrender Experiment is interesting because it's

I recommended it to my text messaging group, and they were a little confused that I was advocating a surrender strategy when unscripted is about taking the reins and control of your life. And when I was merely surrender merely is about accepting what life throws at you instead of trying to fight it. And a good example of that is actually I have many examples of this. But when we were moving to a new state,

the truck that we rented wasn't available. We got there, we took the truck and they're like, "Oh, the tire is busted. We don't have a truck for you." So our first reaction was like, "Oh, no truck, no truck."

And then we remember just surrender to that because you know what? Maybe we would have been stuck in the middle of the desert with a flat tire. And we're lucky they told us this now where we can fix it and not in the middle of some desert, you know, on the phone trying to get this truck repaired. So that's an example of using surrender. So those those books are.

Very, very mindset type of books and happiness and really, really good books. No matter if you want to be in business or not. Awesome. Well, yeah, I've read The Power of Now, but I haven't heard of the other two. So definitely look into those. Appreciate you sharing them. Sure, sure. And MJ, so this has been a wonderful conversation. I really learned a lot from your book and also from this podcast. And so for anyone listening and they want to learn more about you or your work, where's the best place for them to go?

Sure. I run a business forum, thefastlaneforum.com. It is perfectly free to join. There's no hoops to jump through. I'm there every single day contributing with the readers.

And also, you know, I'm on Instagram, Twitter, The Usual Suspects. My books are all on Amazon, Unscripted, The Millionaire Fastlane, and The Great Rat Race Escape. But mainly, if you want to contact me, visit the forum, thefastlaneforum.com. Again, I'm there every single day. Awesome. And MJ, I just want to end by saying thank you so much for writing The Millionaire Fastlane, The Great Rat Race Escape. Really enjoyed your books. And thank you so much for coming on the Read a Journey podcast today. Hey, I appreciate the invite, man. Thanks for having me.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Reader's Journey. You can learn more about what's covered in today's podcast in the show notes below.

If you enjoyed this podcast, the best way you can support it is by subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you're looking for reading tips or book recommendations, head over to alexandbooks.com. If you want to join my reading journey, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter by searching for Alex and Books. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you soon. Read on, everyone.