I want to try and keep this post positive. But over the last couple months of working with a lot of sellers and buyers of exotic cars, I've noticed something. There are a lot of guys who get into the entrepreneurship game and it ends up being worse for them than the slow-lane. I hear about these guys because these are the favorite war stories of the dealers. A guy's ebook or product has a great quarter on Amazon, so he comes in and buys a used 458. Turns out it was just a fad; dealer buys the same car back 900 miles later for $30,000 less, resells it, repeat. Sometimes I get to talk to these people at business owner networking things (which is where I find dealership clients). A couple of them I know from college, engineers who have been talking about their big idea since freshman year. Our ten year reunion is two years away.
I don't want to rag on so-called wantrepreneurs, more offer some observations as a warning. A symptom is not the same as the disease; doing these things will not mean you're going to be broke forever. But a good diagnosis exists for a reason, and I think this is one. With that said, I want to share with you some common traits I've seen in people who haven't made any forward progress. These people, IMO, do not have fastlane DNA. At least not yet.
1. People who can't work without being told what to do.
From the time you're born until the time you retire (if you're slow-lane or sidewalk) your life is fairly free of autonomy and options. You wake up when your job dictates you do, vacation when it dictates you can, see your kids when it lets you, and so on. You get trained when you learn to use the toilet, trained to write and read, trained to study for tests, trained in subjects in college, trained at your job, trained by parenting classes, etc. It's very rare that you will come to a juncture in your slow-lane life where the obstacle in front of you will appear in this form:
"I have absolutely no idea what to do or how to do it, and I know absolutely nobody who does either."
Yet as an entrepreneur, that kind of a thing is a daily, sometimes hourly occurrence. That feeling is the barrier to entry that forms the C in Cents. If you've managed to grow up and become an adult and don't know how to do this thing, and don't know anyone else who does, it's possible that nobody knows how to do the thing you're trying to do. And if it's something lots of other people want to do, then your inability to google a quick solution is very, very good.
In these situations, you usually end up finding a bunch of solutions to similar problems that get you part of the way there. What's left is the undiscovered country of control, but if you can't find your way without a map, you're lost as an entrepreneur. If you can only make your way forward if someone tells you the exact steps and doesn't leave anything out, you won't make it at all. I wouldn't bet on this guy.
2. People who follow their bliss instead of following the market.
I'm guilty of this. This is how my Fastlane journey started. It's been talked about to death here, but it really is a major land-mine for people. It is simply not enough to be really excited about something if it fails so many CENTS/CENTS principles that you can't make a living off of it. Because really, at the end of the day, when people say that they're "doing what they love," they're not really anyway, they're just doing something close to it, because they understand that actually doing what they'd love to do (ex. being a professional Victoria's Secret model's husband and taker of $80,000 vacations or something) isn't a thing. So they say they love being a school teacher instead, when really, they only love it a small part of the time.
If you haven't pushed hard enough to really fail at your work, then you should still do that before you write off your venture as a flight of fancy rather than a fastlane, but if you have and it really bombed, let it die. Some guys can't because they don't want to. I wouldn't bet on that guy.
3. People who need gratuitous rewards for minor achievements.
Everybody knows this guy. This is the guy who rewards himself with two hours of video games for buying a domain name. This is the guy who wants $150,000 compensation when all they have is a business plan and no customers or sales. This guy is so busy being impressed with his own small victories and inconsequential "progress" that after eight months his business is still in the drawing board phase. If you can't take some austerity as you knuckle down and get to work, you're not going to make it to the finish line. You'll work without pay, you'll spend hours during the weekend, and you'll lose lots of money figuring things out. A guy who can't delay gratification for two days won't make it through a 5-10 year journey which begins with enormous hardship. I wouldn't bet on him.
4. Guys who can't make small but significant daily progress on a huge, daunting problem.
You can't cram the fastlane. You can't build up the kind of consistent, lasting reputation for customer service and quality products you need to disentangle your time from your income if you can't make inroads in manageable bits and keep the big picture in mind. There are lots of tools to help with this, heck, both MJ and a product that ran a $300,000+ kickstarter on this form make aides to help you break down your big future into manageable daily portions.
An alternative variation to this is guys who know basically what steps they need, but who front-load all the easy stuff and put off the hard stuff until the last possible minute. Logo design and filing LLC paperwork come first, filing the design patents and setting up overseas manufacturing are puttoff as long as possible. Shopping for office furniture is done on Monday, the call that will decide the fate of the company's first big contract is put off until Friday at 3:30.
If you can't take consistent daily action, you can't make amazing things happen. You can't become that 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 year "overnight" success. If you're the kind of person who only works on things sporadically, you're a bad bet.
5. Guys who spend more time visualizing the rewards of the fastlane than visualizing how they're going to help people solve problems.
I know a guy from college who does this. He's constantly Facebook DMing me pictures of A Lange and Sohne watches he's going to buy when he finishes his app... that he's had the conceptual work laid out for since early 2011. At this point, if anyone cared, half the army of people he's told about it over the last half decade could have dropped $10,000 to hire a crack team of programmers and beat him to market. The worst part is, all this time, and he doesn't even know if there is a market for his idea or not. Phones are pretty different today, tech is in a different place. He could have started over with a more viable idea or, better, he could have knocked this one out in 2011, had a hit, and that would have been the first page in a portfolio of successful apps.
Whether it's looking at cars or houses or boats or clothes in the evenings, if you haven't spent years working on your business, there's no point in spending even a second thinking about this stuff. It doesn't matter what the current price for a Rolex or a 599 is now, because if you're just starting out, it'll probably be completely different when you actually have the money to buy one in five years, assuming EVERYTHING goes well. This is focusing on your own needs rather than your customers. This is the antithesis of the fastlane. This kind of thing isn't even an action fake. It's just fake period, and only an idiot bets big on a hand with no winning cards in it at all and no poker face to make up for it.
Sorry this is long, but I hope it helps some people. After all, I don't get paid based on sales commissions, so it doesn't do me any good if the dealer buys your car back from you at a fire-sale price a month after you get it.
I don't want to rag on so-called wantrepreneurs, more offer some observations as a warning. A symptom is not the same as the disease; doing these things will not mean you're going to be broke forever. But a good diagnosis exists for a reason, and I think this is one. With that said, I want to share with you some common traits I've seen in people who haven't made any forward progress. These people, IMO, do not have fastlane DNA. At least not yet.
1. People who can't work without being told what to do.
From the time you're born until the time you retire (if you're slow-lane or sidewalk) your life is fairly free of autonomy and options. You wake up when your job dictates you do, vacation when it dictates you can, see your kids when it lets you, and so on. You get trained when you learn to use the toilet, trained to write and read, trained to study for tests, trained in subjects in college, trained at your job, trained by parenting classes, etc. It's very rare that you will come to a juncture in your slow-lane life where the obstacle in front of you will appear in this form:
"I have absolutely no idea what to do or how to do it, and I know absolutely nobody who does either."
Yet as an entrepreneur, that kind of a thing is a daily, sometimes hourly occurrence. That feeling is the barrier to entry that forms the C in Cents. If you've managed to grow up and become an adult and don't know how to do this thing, and don't know anyone else who does, it's possible that nobody knows how to do the thing you're trying to do. And if it's something lots of other people want to do, then your inability to google a quick solution is very, very good.
In these situations, you usually end up finding a bunch of solutions to similar problems that get you part of the way there. What's left is the undiscovered country of control, but if you can't find your way without a map, you're lost as an entrepreneur. If you can only make your way forward if someone tells you the exact steps and doesn't leave anything out, you won't make it at all. I wouldn't bet on this guy.
2. People who follow their bliss instead of following the market.
I'm guilty of this. This is how my Fastlane journey started. It's been talked about to death here, but it really is a major land-mine for people. It is simply not enough to be really excited about something if it fails so many CENTS/CENTS principles that you can't make a living off of it. Because really, at the end of the day, when people say that they're "doing what they love," they're not really anyway, they're just doing something close to it, because they understand that actually doing what they'd love to do (ex. being a professional Victoria's Secret model's husband and taker of $80,000 vacations or something) isn't a thing. So they say they love being a school teacher instead, when really, they only love it a small part of the time.
If you haven't pushed hard enough to really fail at your work, then you should still do that before you write off your venture as a flight of fancy rather than a fastlane, but if you have and it really bombed, let it die. Some guys can't because they don't want to. I wouldn't bet on that guy.
3. People who need gratuitous rewards for minor achievements.
Everybody knows this guy. This is the guy who rewards himself with two hours of video games for buying a domain name. This is the guy who wants $150,000 compensation when all they have is a business plan and no customers or sales. This guy is so busy being impressed with his own small victories and inconsequential "progress" that after eight months his business is still in the drawing board phase. If you can't take some austerity as you knuckle down and get to work, you're not going to make it to the finish line. You'll work without pay, you'll spend hours during the weekend, and you'll lose lots of money figuring things out. A guy who can't delay gratification for two days won't make it through a 5-10 year journey which begins with enormous hardship. I wouldn't bet on him.
4. Guys who can't make small but significant daily progress on a huge, daunting problem.
You can't cram the fastlane. You can't build up the kind of consistent, lasting reputation for customer service and quality products you need to disentangle your time from your income if you can't make inroads in manageable bits and keep the big picture in mind. There are lots of tools to help with this, heck, both MJ and a product that ran a $300,000+ kickstarter on this form make aides to help you break down your big future into manageable daily portions.
An alternative variation to this is guys who know basically what steps they need, but who front-load all the easy stuff and put off the hard stuff until the last possible minute. Logo design and filing LLC paperwork come first, filing the design patents and setting up overseas manufacturing are puttoff as long as possible. Shopping for office furniture is done on Monday, the call that will decide the fate of the company's first big contract is put off until Friday at 3:30.
If you can't take consistent daily action, you can't make amazing things happen. You can't become that 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 year "overnight" success. If you're the kind of person who only works on things sporadically, you're a bad bet.
5. Guys who spend more time visualizing the rewards of the fastlane than visualizing how they're going to help people solve problems.
I know a guy from college who does this. He's constantly Facebook DMing me pictures of A Lange and Sohne watches he's going to buy when he finishes his app... that he's had the conceptual work laid out for since early 2011. At this point, if anyone cared, half the army of people he's told about it over the last half decade could have dropped $10,000 to hire a crack team of programmers and beat him to market. The worst part is, all this time, and he doesn't even know if there is a market for his idea or not. Phones are pretty different today, tech is in a different place. He could have started over with a more viable idea or, better, he could have knocked this one out in 2011, had a hit, and that would have been the first page in a portfolio of successful apps.
Whether it's looking at cars or houses or boats or clothes in the evenings, if you haven't spent years working on your business, there's no point in spending even a second thinking about this stuff. It doesn't matter what the current price for a Rolex or a 599 is now, because if you're just starting out, it'll probably be completely different when you actually have the money to buy one in five years, assuming EVERYTHING goes well. This is focusing on your own needs rather than your customers. This is the antithesis of the fastlane. This kind of thing isn't even an action fake. It's just fake period, and only an idiot bets big on a hand with no winning cards in it at all and no poker face to make up for it.
Sorry this is long, but I hope it helps some people. After all, I don't get paid based on sales commissions, so it doesn't do me any good if the dealer buys your car back from you at a fire-sale price a month after you get it.
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