Hi,
My name is Ross, and I'm 28 years old. I recently found a copy of TMF while I was volunteering at a charity book sale. Talk about value-after two reads it turned my world upside down. I got my first tease of something like the fast lane, income decoupled from time, when I was very young. My Mom and Dad, who had dutifully and through many travails ascended to the highest rungs of the slow lane, forced me to do essay contests, web design contests, and science fairs rather than working at Burger King or the mall like my friends. It sucked pretty bad. Or so I thought.
I can still remember the first essay contest I won-eight hours of work, and a few weeks later I was greeted by a check for $1,500 (and this was fifteen years ago). For one day's work in my pajamas at home with my dog nuzzled beside me, I had made what my friends at the mall made in six weeks of full time labor. Wow.
Things were going swimmingly until I hit college, and I suddenly decided I wanted to be a fiction author. I had comparatively few credentials in this field, and it definitely affected my admissions opportunities. The interviewer at Penn asked if I'd made a mistake on the form. My parents were hysterical (because to them, alma mater+job=value as a human being), but I was paying for it myself so there wasn't much else they could do but fret. I was working hard on my first novel, and hoped it'd be done sometime during my first year.
College destroyed my love of writing. I got a little bit better stylistically, but most of what I got was a stupefying dose of post-Marxist theory and the ability to diagram paragraphs and recite a lot of crappy postmodern symbolic fiction. My novel gathered dust, and I painfully returned to my science degree like a dog to its vomit, and graduated with debts and no clear life direction.
Then I graduated. It took me three months to find a job, but I was actually very happy once I got there. The pay was very low, but I liked it so much I would do it for free if I could survive.
That's kind of why I'm here-not to get opulent wealth, but to get the freedom to do charity work without burdening donors with the weight of my salary. I wanted the freedom to travel, focus on the study of languages with a good tutor that could produce lasting results (a hobby of mine) and perhaps to own a sports car for auto-X too, since I'd had the gear head bug from my ex-mechanic father and my GM employee grandfather. That car interest was part of what made me grab TMF , my first self-help book ever.
But you probably didn't need to read all that. Like any shopper, you wanted to know what value I could add to your time here on TMF. I'm glad you asked.
Two years ago, I was a jobless graduate with two masters degrees in religion and thousands in student loan debt. Today my net worth is around $100,000 and climbing rapidly, or nearly double my annual gross (pre-tax) income. One thing I've seen on TMF in my brief look around is that there are a lot of people who are in the position I was two years ago: Broke, maybe in debt, young, and wondering how to get started to insure the fastest merge into the fast lane.
I think I have some tips, and they don't involve MLM, joining a cult (or any religion!), makeup, knives, eating ramen, or heating your house with leaves. MJ said it best when he said that you can't win (plant a money tree) without going on offense. Very true, but if you look at the 2000 Superbowl, a good defense can make scoring a win much easier. I can't teach you how to make a million or get on the fast lane, I've never been there. But I can give you a few suggestions to rapidly go from broke and drowning to a juicy pile of liquidity while you keep your slow-lane job and it's semi-security. If there's interest in this, I'll put it up in another section. If there are already ample threads on this topic, than I hope to collaborate with, encourage, and celebrate the success of the other authors here.
Drive on.
My name is Ross, and I'm 28 years old. I recently found a copy of TMF while I was volunteering at a charity book sale. Talk about value-after two reads it turned my world upside down. I got my first tease of something like the fast lane, income decoupled from time, when I was very young. My Mom and Dad, who had dutifully and through many travails ascended to the highest rungs of the slow lane, forced me to do essay contests, web design contests, and science fairs rather than working at Burger King or the mall like my friends. It sucked pretty bad. Or so I thought.
I can still remember the first essay contest I won-eight hours of work, and a few weeks later I was greeted by a check for $1,500 (and this was fifteen years ago). For one day's work in my pajamas at home with my dog nuzzled beside me, I had made what my friends at the mall made in six weeks of full time labor. Wow.
Things were going swimmingly until I hit college, and I suddenly decided I wanted to be a fiction author. I had comparatively few credentials in this field, and it definitely affected my admissions opportunities. The interviewer at Penn asked if I'd made a mistake on the form. My parents were hysterical (because to them, alma mater+job=value as a human being), but I was paying for it myself so there wasn't much else they could do but fret. I was working hard on my first novel, and hoped it'd be done sometime during my first year.
College destroyed my love of writing. I got a little bit better stylistically, but most of what I got was a stupefying dose of post-Marxist theory and the ability to diagram paragraphs and recite a lot of crappy postmodern symbolic fiction. My novel gathered dust, and I painfully returned to my science degree like a dog to its vomit, and graduated with debts and no clear life direction.
Then I graduated. It took me three months to find a job, but I was actually very happy once I got there. The pay was very low, but I liked it so much I would do it for free if I could survive.
That's kind of why I'm here-not to get opulent wealth, but to get the freedom to do charity work without burdening donors with the weight of my salary. I wanted the freedom to travel, focus on the study of languages with a good tutor that could produce lasting results (a hobby of mine) and perhaps to own a sports car for auto-X too, since I'd had the gear head bug from my ex-mechanic father and my GM employee grandfather. That car interest was part of what made me grab TMF , my first self-help book ever.
But you probably didn't need to read all that. Like any shopper, you wanted to know what value I could add to your time here on TMF. I'm glad you asked.
Two years ago, I was a jobless graduate with two masters degrees in religion and thousands in student loan debt. Today my net worth is around $100,000 and climbing rapidly, or nearly double my annual gross (pre-tax) income. One thing I've seen on TMF in my brief look around is that there are a lot of people who are in the position I was two years ago: Broke, maybe in debt, young, and wondering how to get started to insure the fastest merge into the fast lane.
I think I have some tips, and they don't involve MLM, joining a cult (or any religion!), makeup, knives, eating ramen, or heating your house with leaves. MJ said it best when he said that you can't win (plant a money tree) without going on offense. Very true, but if you look at the 2000 Superbowl, a good defense can make scoring a win much easier. I can't teach you how to make a million or get on the fast lane, I've never been there. But I can give you a few suggestions to rapidly go from broke and drowning to a juicy pile of liquidity while you keep your slow-lane job and it's semi-security. If there's interest in this, I'll put it up in another section. If there are already ample threads on this topic, than I hope to collaborate with, encourage, and celebrate the success of the other authors here.
Drive on.
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