Skip to content

The Best Book I've Ever Read about Making Money

2021-10-08 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 18:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Money and investing) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past

In a Book Club episode on MJ DeMarco's The Millionaire Fastlane, which he calls probably the best book he has read on building a business that makes money, Ali gives five lessons (avoid the slow lane, wealth is a process, build money trees, become a producer, show commitment) and the book's five commandments of need, entry, control, scale and time.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why The Millionaire Fastlane, and what the Book Club episode covers

  • ★★★ Ali calls MJ DeMarco's The Millionaire Fastlane probably the single best book he has read on how to build a business that makes money; a friend told him to ignore its clickbaity title. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★ This Book Club episode, in Ali's series distilling highlights from his favourite books, is on MJ DeMarco's The Millionaire Fastlane: five key lessons and the book's five commandments. — 00:00:00 · Book Club

  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco argues the problem is not getting rich quick but getting rich easy: getting rich quick is very possible, getting rich easy is not. — 00:00:29

    “it's not get rich quick that's a problem. It is get rich easy.”

  • ★★ Ali warns that anyone trying to sell you the idea that it is easy to get rich is running a scam, and you should avoid it. — 00:00:29

  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco describes three paths through life: the sidewalk (living paycheck to paycheck), the slow lane and the fast lane. — 00:00:29

00:00:33 — Lesson one: avoid the slow lane; the sidewalk, the slow lane and the fast lane, and the three traps of the slow lane

  • ★ Ali finds MJ DeMarco's description of the sidewalk a bit disparaging, a brash American style, and says some parts of The Millionaire Fastlane need a pinch of salt. — 00:01:11
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): In The Millionaire Fastlane the slow lane, probably your parents' generation's path, is school, good grades, a decent job, climbing the ladder, saving and investing part of each paycheck, and being rich at retirement. — 00:01:40
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's first slow-lane trap: the slow lane looks safe, but common unexpected events such as a market crash like 2008, having kids, divorce or a health problem make it less safe. — 00:02:09
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): The second slow-lane trap in The Millionaire Fastlane is raising your market value, for example with an MBA: your time is worth more, but you are still trading time for money. — 00:02:39
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): The third slow-lane trap is not believing you can get rich quick; MJ DeMarco's fast lane is a process of probably around ten years, which counts as quick in his book. (hedged) — 00:03:10
  • ★★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's second lesson, work the process: wealth is not an event but a process of many years, though the media report wealth as an event. — 00:03:55

00:04:10 — Lesson two: work the process; wealth is a process, not an event

  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco tells of John Darius Bickoff (as heard), who founded Glassio Vitamin Water (as heard) in 1996 and sold it to Coca-Cola 11 years later for $4.1 billion; people remember the sale, not the 11 years. — 00:04:24
  • ★★ Ali says building a YouTube channel works the same way: you see creators' overnight successes, not the five years of videos no one watched before them. — 00:04:53 · YouTube

  • ★★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's third lesson: build money trees, business systems that survive on their own with periodic support and nurturing, a surrogate for trading time for money. — 00:04:53

    “money trees are business systems that survive on their own.”

00:05:04 — Lesson three: build money trees; rental and distribution systems

  • ★★ Building a money tree, Ali explains, means building a business where the wealth you can generate is not directly tied to the time you put in. — 00:05:23
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): The first money tree in The Millionaire Fastlane is a rental system, renting out something you own: properties, or licensing, such as a musician licensing their audio. — 00:05:23
  • ★ Ali says it is very hard to reach the point of having many properties to rent out, because by then you are probably already rich. — 00:05:23
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): The second money tree in The Millionaire Fastlane is a distribution system connecting people who want something with its suppliers, such as Amazon as middleman between buyers and sellers. — 00:05:52 · Amazon

00:06:21 — AppSumo sponsor read

00:08:18 — Software and content money trees, with his own software and Skillshare class

  • ★★ The third money tree is a software system, Ali explains: make the software or digital product once and sell it many times, since the cost of distribution and replication is effectively zero. — 00:08:18
  • ★★ At medical school Ali built BMAT Ninja and UCAT Ninja, a software platform that helped people prepare for the medical school admissions exams. — 00:08:18
  • ★★ Ali's YouTuber friend Oliur made $9,000 in a single week selling icons he designed, a digital asset he created once for others to buy. — 00:08:51 · YouTube
  • ★★★ The content system, the fourth money tree, is Ali's favourite kind: a book, YouTube video, blog post or online course takes time once and can be sold to many people later. — 00:08:51 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare class on how to study for exams, made a year or two earlier, brings in about $10,000 every month in pure passive income, though he does basically nothing to promote it. — 00:09:21 · Skillshare classes, passive income
  • ★★ The Skillshare class was no get-rich-quick scheme, Ali says: he had made study-themed YouTube videos for two years before it, and the income built up over time now helps pay his mortgage. — 00:09:50 · Skillshare classes, YouTube

00:10:19 — Lesson four: switch from being a consumer to being a producer

  • ★★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's fourth lesson: switch from being a consumer to being a producer; society teaches us from a young age to think about what to buy, and that mindset never builds wealth. — 00:10:19
  • ★ In a Samsung store near his home, Ali caught himself thinking as a producer: about the store's marketing play, its cost, and a video on switching from an iPhone to Samsung. — 00:10:48
  • ★★ Ali's practical tip for a producer mindset: when out and about, think about the business side, for example how McDonald's makes every fish burger taste the same. — 00:11:17
  • ★★ Ali recommends The E-Myth Revisited, one of his favourite business books of all time, on how McDonald's built its franchise system. — 00:11:41

  • ★★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's fifth lesson: show commitment, not just interest; to get rich quick you must do what others will not or cannot. Interest works one hour a day on weekdays, commitment seven days a week. — 00:11:41

    “Commitment works in your business seven days a week, whenever time permits.”

00:12:01 — Lesson five: show commitment, don't just show interest; hard work that can be fun

  • ★★ When first growing his YouTube channel and business, Ali spent basically every waking moment outside work and university planning videos and content and working out business strategy. — 00:12:10 · YouTube
  • ★★★ You do not build a successful business or YouTube channel without hard work, Ali says, but hard work does not have to be suffering: it is hard but can be fun. — 00:12:40 · feel-good productivity (concept), YouTube
  • ★★ Ali says the book he is writing is about how to make things fun. — 00:12:40
  • ★★ Ali says an easy, chilled-out life, as anti-hustle-culture voices urge, is fine if you want it, but to build wealth in a short time you cannot take the easy route and must be committed. — 00:13:21
  • ★★ Doing a YouTube channel or business half an hour a day is fine as a hobby, Ali says, but you are then very unlikely to be successful, depending on your goals. — 00:13:21 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali listened to The Millionaire Fastlane on Audible; it is very dense and reads more like a textbook than a storybook, which he likes, and he recommends it. — 00:14:02 · Audible
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's five commandments: dropping one or two could still make you rich, but following all five makes becoming a millionaire in under ten years much more likely. — 00:14:02
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco says 90% of businesses fail within their first five years because they break the commandment of need: people must actually need what you offer. — 00:14:31

00:14:46 — The five commandments: need, entry, control, scale and time

  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's commandment of entry: build in a zone with a high barrier to entry, because a high barrier makes your business very difficult to copy. — 00:14:56
  • ★★ Ali likes YouTube because it still has the highest barrier to entry among creator platforms, with production value rising every year; a podcast, a blog or TikTok is lower. — 00:15:25 · YouTube, Instagram
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's commandment of control: at every step be in control of what you sell, including its price, management and sales. — 00:15:54
  • ★★★ Ali calls a business built only on a YouTube channel very scary: his business lives and dies by his channel, so with courses like the Part-Time YouTuber Academy he tries to control as much of the process as possible. — 00:16:30 · YouTube, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Multi-level marketing schemes do not work, Ali says, because selling someone else's product leaves you no control over the process. — 00:16:30
  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's commandment of scale: build a business that can scale; a barbershop at £10 a cut barely can, a software or content business really can. — 00:17:03

  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's law of affection (as heard): to make millions, you have to impact millions of people, or fewer people with a very large impact. — 00:17:33

    “to make millions, you have to impact millions.”

  • ★★ MJ DeMarco (quoted): MJ DeMarco's commandment of time: build a business whose value is disconnected from your personal time input. — 00:18:02

  • ★★ Ali says his YouTube business breaks the commandment of time, since he must keep showing up to record videos; he would like a future business where he does not have to show up at all, and a written book just sells. — 00:18:02 · YouTube

00:18:31 — Wrap-up and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali says that at the time of his video on nine passive income ideas he was making $27,000 a week from those passive income sources. — 00:18:31 · passive income

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: MJ DeMarco · money tree · The Millionaire Fastlane

Also: People: Oliur

Projects: BMAT Ninja (website) · Book Club · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Skillshare classes · UKCAT Ninja

Works: The E-Myth

Organizations: Amazon · Coca-Cola · McDonald's · Samsung · YouTube

Concepts: digital asset · feel-good productivity (concept) · passive income · producer mindset

Products: Audible

Replies to

← Previous: How to ‘Read’ 1000 Books a Year · Next → Helicopters, Travel and Film Making - A Conversation with Becki and Chris