The story I’m about to
share seems like a fairy tale from a Cinderella book.
Some people were born
just to be rich, right?
Wrong.
Reading this story, I’m
now convinced that anybody can become rich no matter their social status, background,
race, culture, geographical location or color.
As a teenager, he never gave himself
a chance of becoming wealthy young.
Wealth and youth was an equation that didn’t
compute to him simply because he didn’t have the physical capabilities. According
to him, or at least according to common beliefs at the time, the road to wealth
for the young was competitive and required talent; become an actor, a musician,
an entertainer, or a pro athlete like Michael Jordan - all familiar roads had a big “ROAD CLOSED”
sign that laughed at him; “Not a chance YOUNG MAN!”
So, early in life, he gave up on the idea.
Instead, he concentrated on the common mantra - “go to school, get a job, save 10 percent, be miserly, and, someday, maybe
you can retire rich, albeit, old, and give up on those grandiose ideas of
freedom, mountainside homes, and exotic cars. Just settle for less”.
But, he still dreamed. It’s what teenage boys do. For MJ
DeMarco, a young kid from the “not-so-affluent” suburbs of downtown Chicago, it
was all about the cars – particularly the Lamborghini
Kuntash, the car he was in love with at the time. He had its posters all over his
walls and was always looking at it in magazines.
Growing up in Chicago, MJ DeMarco
was just a porky kid with few friends and no girlfriends. He wasn’t
interested in teenage girls or playing sports but eating donuts, playing video
games, and bowling. With the help of an improvised broken broomstick, which
he used as a remote control since the real one was broken, most of his time would
be spent on the couch watching TV, and when he did move, the local ice cream parlour
eating ice cream and sugary items was often his destination. I mean, this dude
was lazy. But what do you expect from a young teenager from a broken family with
nothing do?
Then came the day that would change his life…
That day was like any other day. He rushed to the ice
cream parlour to satisfy his tasty indulgence.
When he arrived, there IT was
- the Lamborghini Countach, famous
from 1980s hit movie, Cannonball Run.
Awestruck, any thought about ice cream vanished from his brain. It was parked
stoically like a king; He gazed upon it like a worshiper beholden to its god.
Huge and imposing, it sat there idly like a sleeping dragon. It was also his
sledgehammer that knocked his lazy ass out of park and set forth his ‘Fastlane’ shortcut.
He gawked at the car for a few
moments until a young man left the ice cream parlor and headed toward the car.
Could this be the owner? No way. He couldn’t have been more than 25-years-old.
When MJ awoke from his stupor,
he finally summoned his guts to ask the young man,“Excuse me sir, may I ask what you do for a
living that allows you to afford such an awesome car?
The owner kindly responded: “I’m an
inventor.”
Perplexed that his answer didn’t match his preconception; his
prepared follow-up questions were nullified before they were uttered,
paralyzing his next move.
He stood there frozen like the ice cream he had sought
minutes earlier, as the loud roar of the Lamborghini’s exhaust swept through the parking lot alerting all life
forms to the Lamborghini’s formidable presence.
What changed that day? He was exposed to the Fastlane. As
for the sweets he pursued earlier that day, they were forgotten. He turned
around and went back home with a new awakening. He wasn’t athletic, he
couldn’t sing, and he couldn’t act – right there and then, he knew he
could get rich without fame or without physical talent.
From that point onwards, things changed. The Lamborghini
encounter lasted about 90 seconds, but it transcended a lifetime of new beliefs,
directions, and choices. He decided that he
would someday own a Lamborghini and he would do it while he was young.
He was unwilling to wait until his next encounter, his next chance experience
or the next wall poster.
He wanted it for himself.
After his Lamborghini encounter, he made a conscious effort
to study young
millionaires who weren’t famous or physically
talented. But he wasn’t interested in all millionaires, just those who lived a
rich, extravagant lifestyle. This examination led him to study a limited,
obscure group of people, a small subset of fameless Millionaires who met his
criterion.
He sought millionaires who would have started like him – an
average guy without any special skill or talent who, somehow, made it big.
Through high school and college, he religiously studied this
millionaire divergence. He read magazines, books, and newspapers, watched
documentaries of successful businessmen; anything that provided insight into
this small, subset of millionaires, he absorbed it.
Unfortunately, this zest to uncover the secret to fast wealth led him to
disappointments. Gullible, willing to spend and armed with a credit card,
he bought into every “get-rich-quick” opportunity. None of them delivered
wealth.
As he fed his appetite for knowledge and endured one odd job
after another, his research uncovered some remarkable common denominators. He
was confident that he had uncovered all the components to The Millionaire Fastlane and fameless wealth. He was determined to
become rich young and the journey would begin after college graduation. Little
did he know what lay ahead – the roadblocks, the detours, and the mistakes.
After enduring five years of college, graduating with two
business degrees from Northern Illinois University, jobless and stubbornly set
on starting a business, he avoided any job that could imprison his time in a 9
to 5 grind. He was 22 years old, cocky, confident, and determined. His idea was
to find the Fastlane, retire rich and retire young.
According to MJ, “college was a
five-year prenatal corporate brainwashing with graduation as the overrated peak.
He viewed college as indoctrination into corporate droneship - an unfulfilled marriage between him and a life
of jobs, bosses and being overworked and underpaid. His friends were hired
for great jobs and openly bragged about it”.
Despite the confidence, the next
few years fell horribly short of his expectations. He lived with his single
mother as he hop-scotched from one business venture to another. Every month
was a different business: Vitamins, jewelry, some hot “turn-key” marketing
program purchased from the back of a business magazine, or some goofy long
distance network marketing gig. He would pursue fools’ gold scooped up
from a pile of manure, throw it on the wall and hope it would stick.
Nothing did.
His ego-crippling jobs included: A
bus-boy at a Chinese restaurant, a day laborer in the slums of Chicago,
pizza-delivery boy, flower-delivery boy, dispatcher, limo driver, early morning
newspaper delivery for the Chicago Tribune, Subway sandwich restaurant salesman
(WTF?), Sears stock clerk (in the freaking drapery department), charity can
collector, and house painter. The only thing worse than these
shitty jobs and their low pay were the hours. Most required a predawn start …
3am, 4am … if any ungodly hour was involved, you could bet his job required
it. Hell, money was so tight that he prostituted himself to an older
woman to pay for his best friend’s wedding gift…
Meanwhile, his friends progressed
in their careers: They got their four-percent yearly promotions, they bought
their Mustangs and Acuras, and they bought their 1,200 square foot townhouses. They
appeared to be content and lived the expectant life pre-ordained by society.
Fast forward, MJ’s breakthrough
came when he moved to Pheonix with only $900 with no
job, no friends, and no family.
His possessions
included an old mattress, a ten-year-old rusty Buick Skylark with no third
gear, a few side businesses that made little cash, and several hundred
books. Ground zero for his new life was a small studio apartment in
central Phoenix that rented for $475 per month. He transformed his studio
apartment into an office. No bedroom set; no furniture - just a mattress
that sprawled into the kitchen. He slept with the Pop Tart crumbs, a side
effect of laying a mattress next to the kitchen counter. He lived poor and
without security, but he felt rich. He was in control of his life. He had
freedom.
There, he became a limo driver, but
continued to visit the local library to absorb everything he could read about
the Fastlane life.
One of the many businesses he
created was a website to connect customers with limousines. While driving
the limo, he had plenty of downtime to read books – sometimes he’d sit idle for
hours. He did not waste any time. While he waited for clients at the airport or
while they got drunk at the local beer parlor, he would sit in the limo and
read. And reading he did. He studied everything from finance to
Internet programming to more autobiographies of the rich.
Then one day he got a call from a
client in Kansas who saw his limo website and wanted MJ to design a similar
website. He charged them $400 for a website that was complete in 24 hours.
Another client from New York wanted a website and he charged them $600 for a
website that took 2 days. That was $1,000 in three days. He thought he had won
the Powerball.
Meanwhile, he continued getting a
ton of web traffic to his limo website as inquiries came in. A visiting friend
advised him to find a way to monetize the traffic. That’s when the idea of “lead
generation” struck him. The lead generation ideas had not come to many people
at the time. He created other websites. The
first month the new system generated $473. He continued to build more websites. The
second month revenues were $694. Third month $970. Then, $1,832, $2,314
and $3,733. And the money kept
coming…
Then in 2000, his telephone rang with a different type of
inquiry. Technology start-ups started to call; they wanted to know if he would
sell his business. In that year, the dot-com frenzy was in full force.
Not a day went by without a tall tale about some dot-com millionaire who struck
it rich by selling a tech property. Remember, the fame-less millionaires?
This subset of the rich grew at a staggering rate, and the wave swelled his
way. So, did he want
to sell his company?
Hell yes!
He had
three offers to sell - Offer 1: $250,000, Offer 2: $550,000 and Offer 3: $1,200,000. He accepted the third offer
and became an instant millionaire...
Read the rest of the story from MJ DeMarco’s bestselling
book, The Millionaire Fastlane – Crack The
Code To Wealth, and Live Rich for A Lifetime.
Hello, my name is Flavian Mwasi. I'm an online marketer, entrepreneur, personal development and success coach.
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