A quick hello and some thankyous

[Developmental]

Hello!

I'm Matt, from the UK, 23 year old Mechanical Engineering graduate

I've been self employed for the last 6 years doing race car driving instruction and later sailing yacht skippering (for those of you that have just done the maths, yea, a 17 year old teaching people to drive race cars - I had an uphill struggle to build the credibility to do that one!)

I've always been entrepreneurial, but have grown up in a family where the slowlane mentality is incredibly engrained - so psychologically I've had my struggles

I love playing music and for me song lyrics have a powerful effect, and whenever thinking about life, I always have a Frank Turner song running around in my mind (fits in surprisingly well with the analogies used in TMF !)

"Oh maturity's a wrapped up package deal so it seems
And ditching teenage fantasy means ditching all your dreams
All your friends and peers and family solemnly tell you you will
Have to grow up be an adult yeah be bored and unfulfilled
Oh when no ones yet explained to me exactly what's so great
About slaving 50 years away on something that you hate,
About meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity
Well if that's your road then take it but it's not the road for me
...
And if all you ever do with your life
Is just photosynthesize
Then you deserve every hour of these sleepless nights
That you waste wondering when you're gonna die"

I've always known that I don't want to sit rotting behind a desk working my a$$ off for someone else until I'm old and decrepit, my dream in life, as a passionate sailor, is to do a very leisurely circumnavigation, which most definitely cannot be achieved with the slowlane - in the slowlane if I could afford it financially I most probably wouldn't physically be capable of it any more. I've always defined success in terms of my freedom to achieve personal goals and to be free to chose what I want to do and when I want to do it. I've never defined my success in terms of money or consumerism

So in essence, to run with the car analogy, I was sat on the right idealogical road with my engine running but my windscreen was fogged up - and @MJ DeMarco cleared that windscreen right up for me and allowed me to see the road ahead that I hoped was there. So MJ, I honestly owe you a debt of gratitude, to say that book is a lifechanger would definitely not be an overstatement

My second thanks goes to @JackEdwards for it was your progress thread that I stumbled across from a Google search that introduced me to this forum and to TMF and made me realise just how possible it is to be very successful. Before that thread, my life plan was to slowlane it whilst victualling and preparing a (very capable but very small) $10,000 boat for longterm cruising then pack in the slowlane and live a life of hand to mouth subsistence aboard my boat whilst cruising the world - many people do it, living aboard a sub-30ft boat on $500 a month that people earn over the winter when they aren't cruising.

I thought those big, expensive, comfortable cruisers, like the one in my avatar were for other people, the lucky ones. So Jack, a sincere thankyou for posting your progress thread, without it I would not have ever thought it possible to circumnavigate in anything other than what can only be described as marine poverty. You have given me the ambition to expand my means.

and I can't go through thankyous without mentioning @IceCreamKid and @(zend***phin) for both of your gold threads, to realise that the only way to have a truly successful business is to have an honest desire to improve people's lives and not to think in terms of what can I sell someone, but to think how can I help this person

So you can probably tell that I've been lurking for a while, reading, learning and thinking and it has been this forum that has given me the inspiration for my own fastlane business, which is at the moment a well researched idea that is being executed, which hopefully has the potential to be a game changer in a big international market. I will be posting my own progress thread to help keep me accountable for good progress.

so to summarise a long and wandering post, hello and thankyou to everyone on here for what is an incredible resource, i'm grateful for it and hope to be able to contribute back

all the best,

Matt

 

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