YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*Extremely ambitious entrepreneurs who always want to go faster faster faster, and who want to learn how to focus all of that excess energy into the high-leverage activities that will help them accomplish their goals sooner.

*Business owners and leaders at all levels in the corporate hierarchy who want to learn the open secrets and best practices of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country, including mindsets, strategies, and tactics they can use to wield greater influence and make a larger impact within their organizations.

*Anyone who is perpetually dissatisfied with the "culturally approved" pathways to success, and who harbors secret suspicions that there's a better, more exciting, and more profitable path forward that most of the people around them either can't or don't want to see.

*Creative thinkers and visionaries who are willing to work harder and longer than most people, but who want to be steered toward the activities and inputs that are going to make the biggest difference, and who don't want to waste time traveling the "slow lane" to success (or be held back by the advice and thinking of people who will never be successful at any speed).

Most of the advice you're likely to receive out there - regardless of whether it's well-meaning or malicious in intent - is going to come from unsuccessful people who do not have what you want in life. But ask yourself: if you don't want to live like them, why are you listening to them?!

In this book, legendary marketer and multimillionaire-maker Dan S. Kennedy inspires you to seize control of the very last of your human freedoms - the freedom to choose your own way and walk your own path. He shows you why you should follow the law but not the rules, and how you can claim the kind of rewards - financial, emotional, and otherwise - usually reserved for the top 1% of our society.

The truth is that each of us possesses a dizzying amount of personal freedom, but our awareness of that tremendous power has been sucked out of us by a society that doesn't want any of its semi-depressed, psychologically-stunted worker ants to escape and realize they could actually ask for more out of life.

As just one example of many I could give, here's what society tells you at every step of your journey through life:

Get Married (Sink $20K Deeper Into Debt)
Buy a New Car (Sink $50K Deeper Into Debt)
*Go to College (Sink $100K Deeper Into Debt)
*Buy a House (Sink $500K Deeper Into Debt)

Then Society Says: "Congratulations!!!"

Suddenly, you're saddled with $670,000 of debt or more, forced to slave away at a job you (probably) hate for 40+ years, fed scraps tossed from the plates of your employers bringing home 10X more than you, toiling in obscurity and insecurity for decades of the most precious, vital years of your life...

And what's more is that this obsequiousness is met with shining approval and words of encouragement and praise from masses of desperately unhealthy and unhappy people who are being forced into the very same trap as you are.

For what it's worth, I will admit that it's possible to be happy and healthy while doing all of the above: getting a "good" job, getting married, buying a house, etc. Maybe you like what you do, and you are actually staying on top of your health and fitness while working a corporate job that adequately pays for your lifestyle. Too many people in the entrepreneurship space ruthlessly rip on 9-5s without ever considering that for a meaningful number of people, there's nothing "wrong" with that life at all! It can work for some people.

So no, I'm not here to say that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, or a "laptop millionaire" or anything like that. But if you do want more out of life, it's available to you, and Dan Kennedy's books will show you how to get there.

Speaking for myself, I'm not really a rule-follower by nature, so this book naturally spoke to me and my propensity to search for a better, more efficient, more profitable way of doing business and realizing my entrepreneurial vision. Exactly as the title says, it's an unconventional guide to success that flies in the face of the shamefully bad advice out there about how to succeed in business and in life.

No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules dismantles ideas like these and others that hold too many good people back from achieving astronomical levels of personal and financial success:

*Positive Thinking is the Answer to All Your Problems

*You Need a College Education to Be Successful in Life

*You Should Be Humble and Non-Threatening at All Times

*You Need to Have Brilliant, All-Original Ideas to Get Rich

*It Takes Money to Make Money in This World

*Some People Were Born to Be Successful and You Weren't

*All You Have to Do is Just Never Give Up

Many of these statements are half-truths at best, applicable in some situations and not others, and all of them have a deeper level of nuance to them that most people just don't understand (or are never taught).

For example: positive thinking is great! But it's not the answer to everything, and sometimes, reality-based, neutral thinking is what's called for.

You don't need a college education to be successful, but it's right for some people; and necessary for certain careers and life paths but ruinous for other people.

Sometimes you do have to be more aggressive and assertive - to take up more space in this world - and as Zig Ziglar said, timid salespeople have skinny kids.

You also don't need original ideas - the massive money is made in the execution of ideas, not just having them. The graveyard is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world because of the value of the ideas that are buried there.

Having money can definitely help you make more money, but it can also sink your wealth-creation efforts in surprising, non-obvious ways.

Many successful do have natural talents and abilities, but there's a whole other layer to their lives and stories that most people don't see. So natural ability and unfair advantages aren't the whole answer either.

And sometimes, giving up is the right answer! Sometimes you should stop trying to succeed in one area so you can free up time, energy, and other resources and put them into something else that will work. All these ideas and more are explored in this book, and knowing these things could save you decades of wasted and unnecessary pain and frustration.

Again, most of the advice you're going to hear out there in the world will come from people who will never be successful and will never get what they want out of life. That may sound harsh, but it's true. Real success - and the accompanying massive paydays - are reserved for those daring enough to break free from convention and play by their own rules. I've done it, Dan's done it, and now he shows you how to do it here in this book. He'll show you how to crush convention, command respect, and conquer your rivals on your road to success.

Your best thinking of yesterday is simply the old baggage you're carrying around today, and a lot of this outdated, antiquated, and sometimes downright harmful advice needs to be swept aside if you're ever going to the ascend to the heights you're truly capable of reaching.

The bottom line here is that there’s always a way to succeed, but you’re not likely to find it by following the crowd. To borrow from The Third Door, by Alex Banayan (another excellent book), life is like a nightclub. Most people are standing in line in front of the main entrance, waiting patiently, quietly following the rules, hoping eventually to get in. There’s also the VIP line going back in the opposite direction, where celebrities and people with money and connections also clamber to get in. Then there’s “the third door.” 

The third door is the one you make yourself. It’s where you go around the back of the building, crack open a window, climb in through the kitchen, slipping past security and the rest of the staff unseen and making your own way in. Dan Kennedy’s book will help you find the third doors that exist all around us, as well as show you how to make your own. Now, all you need to do is find or develop the courage to walk through them.

#1: Reasoned Optimism > Positive Thinking

There's nothing necessarily wrong with positive thinking, unless of course it's all you do. There's even a place for neutral thinking, which Dan Kennedy would no doubt appreciate. But reasoned optimism is a solid approach. It's about giving yourself reasons to be optimistic, rather than puffing yourself with meaningless motivational phrases and manufactured confidence.

True confidence comes from competence, from being good at something, building real-world skills that you can deploy in service of getting what you want out of life. The false confidence that comes from positive thinking is ephemeral, flimsy, and likely to collapse at the first sign of real struggle or challenge.

In place of positive thinking, extend yourself, and expend real effort in becoming competent, so that you can look back at what you've done and draw confidence from your "reference experiences" - times when you've done this before, times when you've succeeded. Then you can be positive because you possess real confidence stemming from competence. It's one of the only kinds of mindsets that can survive first contact with reality.

#2: A Story About Why Natural Ability Doesn't Matter

#3: Big Commitment to Big Goals Build Big People

Negative conditioning in the areas of money and wealth-building can obscure the fundamental point behind Dan Kennedy's advice here. But hey, people are going to misunderstand you anyway, so you may as well just get rich in spite of them. The fundamental truth you have to convince yourself of is simply this: there are many paths to self-overcoming and to personal development, and the achievement of worldly success is just one of many valid paths to realizing your potential.

Some people aim to conquer space, others commit to working toward their Ph.D. Some people target the achievement of an Olympic gold medal or a world championship, and still others throw their heart and soul into building wildly profitable businesses. There are many as great lives that it's possible to live as there are people to live them.

What they all have in common, however, is that those pursuits - when taken up in good faith and with the intention of committing one's heart and soul to the endeavor - enlarge the person undertaking that quest. To use a Simpson's expression, those noble pursuits "embiggen the smallest man." Pursuing something (single-mindedly, drawing upon all your talents and capacities) is the growth choice, and you don't have to explain yourself to anyone.

Remember this the next time someone tries to belittle your pursuit of wealth, or questions your dream of building a better life for yourself. Big commitments to big goals build big people, and how you choose to grow is your choice and yours alone.

#4: Oh Yeah, and College Doesn't Matter Either

I'll say right upfront that I went to university and I don't regret it one bit. So when I agree with Dan that university doesn't matter, I'm not saying this as someone who didn't have the opportunity to go, or who's criticizing it without knowing anything about the experience itself and all the benefits. And there are benefits - a multitude of them. It's just that if you didn't go to university, you're not a failure, and you're definitely not lost.

Some of the greatest times of my entire life happened while I was at university, and the friendships, connections, and social skills I picked up there have served me extremely well ever since. But there are lots of places you can gain similar benefits, and with the exception of certain careers where a degree is required (becoming a doctor, say), you definitely don't need a degree to be successful and live a fantastic life.

In fact, many of the millionaires and wildly successful business owners in my personal network aren't even all that smart. Seriously! They'd even say this themselves. Some of them wouldn't be able to pass an entrance exam, yet those same people earn more money in one year than your average university professor earns in ten years. Again: university degrees are not required to be successful.

Not only that, but you've almost definitely heard of rich college dropouts and broke, brilliant individuals with Ph.D.'s. So there are lots of reasons to go to university, lots of reasons not to go, and the choice (as always) is completely up to you. But there's one more thing to remember...

University is also an extension of the high school learning environment, one characterized by various authority figures telling you to follow the rules, do what you're told, do what they say, don't ask questions, wait your turn, follow this path, place your faith completely and totally in a system that doesn't care about your happiness one bit...and that's the exact opposite of being an entrepreneur.

#5: Arrogance is an Almost Essential Success Characteristic

This is probably the most misunderstood (but immensely powerful) piece of business/career advice in the entire book, and I'll use myself as an example here to show you why arrogance isn't the absolutely awful personal quality that most people think it is. At least not always. This is difficult to explain, but I'll try.

If you can, detach from your arrogance and use it as a tool, not as an unconscious, destructive aspect of your own personality. When I use arrogance as a tool, there's another, very real part of me that realizes that it's all for show. Even though I'll shoot a video featuring me reciting Hamlet's soliloquy from Act 3, Scene 1 while doing 70lbs bicep curls, I also possess extreme intellectual humility, springing from the fact that I know basically nothing, compared to what there is to know. Sure, I've read a lot of books and can quote a lot of famous authors, but the knowledge stored inside my head is still vanishingly small when you think about the total knowledge that exists.

I wonder if the above explanation helped at all. Hopefully it did. I guess what I'm saying is that I possess the ability to loudly and confidently assert my right to be in whichever room I wish to enter, but that doesn't automatically turn me into a raging narcissist, and it certainly doesn't preclude me from treating every individual with whom I come into contact with dignity and respect.

These qualities, behaviors, and attitudes are not mutually exclusive. They can exist within the same individual and find expression at appropriate times when the situation calls for it. You don't have to be a jerk, even while you aggressively shove it in the world's face that you are here, and you will not be ignored.

What's more, you must do this or else you will be ignored. Speaking of people who have gained prominence in various fields and achieved popular success, Dan Kennedy says this:

Apologies in advance for swearing, but if you don't possess the ability to turn up your arrogance to the appropriate level at will, and in the appropriate places, you will get run the fuck over by people who do. You must think, move, act, and speak as though you deserve to be there, or else you won't be there for long.

Like I said, this is a difficult topic to speak about, because many of us grew up being taught that it wasn't polite to stand up, stand out, and assert ourselves. That pride and radical self-belief were somehow "wrong," and that we should be humble and quiet and "over there." This is flat wrong, and if you want to be taken seriously in the business world you'll need to get over this way of thinking.

You are no better than anyone else, but you're definitely no worse than anyone else either. There's a balance that can be struck between appropriate arrogance and being an unwelcome jerk, and most people can't really tell the difference when they've crossed over that line.

But I can tell you from experience that you're probably not too arrogant. If anything, you probably tend in the other direction, as most people do, so you could probably stand to turn up the arrogance a little bit. In this, as in all things, self-awareness and social intelligence is absolutely crucial.

#6: Command and Demand Respect

You teach the world how to treat you, and nowhere is this truer than in the modern business environment. You need to demand what you're worth, and expect to receive it, or you never will. Much of the corporate world is too competitive to operate in any other way, and as Zig Ziglar said, timid salespeople have skinny kids!

This is an extension of the previous Key Idea, but it's subtly different, and it still doesn't mean that you have to go around acting like a jerk. They've heard of you, because you've made them aware of your existence, and now you have to make them respect you and give you what you're worth. But, there are better and worse ways to go about it.

Be courteous, polite, and respectful, but be firm, damn it, and demand from the universe what's coming to you. Don't let people get away with siphoning off what's rightfully yours, thinking you won't notice or that you're too weak to do anything about it. Be dangerous. Be assertive. Be respectable.

#7: When They Show Up, Charge 'Em

I'm not letting go of this idea, because it's so critical to get this right. One of the ways that people undervalue themselves and sell themselves short is by not charging nearly enough for their products and services. Most people need to raise their prices. Still others need to stop giving away free work.

There's a lot more to this idea than I have space for here, but I'll lay out a few things I've learned, specifically from running my coaching business. On the one hand, you do want to stack the value of your offer as much as possible, by overdelivering and exceeding any reasonable standard of value that your prospective customer would find anywhere else.

For me, that looks like coaching right off the bat, during the sales call itself, even before they've paid me. To some, that might look like "working for free," but I don't see it that way. If I'm going to be spending a decent amount of time with this person, I want to know what they're like, and I want them to know what the coaching experience with me is like, so they can make an informed decision. So yes, I'll "coach them for free" during the initial assessment.

But I do not work for free. I don't offer handouts, and I don't do "just this one thing" in the "hope" that they'll pay me later. "Oh yea I'll take a look at your landing page for you." NO!! My time, effort, and knowledge is reserved for people with valid credit cards and who have made a firm financial commitment to purchase my advice. "Well I usually charge for this, but just this once..." NO!! I WILL NOT!!

Felix Dennis makes a similar point in his excellent (though somewhat tragic) book, How to Get Rich. On the subject of equity, he said that he would not give a single percentage point that he didn't have to. Ownership is the name of the game! Never, ever, ever give it up unless you absolutely have to! The meek and humble may inherit the earth, but not in this lifetime!

#8: "The Rules" are Barely Even "Suggestions"

Question everything in business, just as in life. One of the many, many reasons to read books like those of Jiddu Krishnamurti (and Dan Kennedy, of course) is that they get you to question all your assumptions about how the world is "supposed to" work, what's actually going on here, and what the rules are.

Because in a lot of cases (a surprising number), the rules are just made up.

Here's the real crazy part: the rules weren't put in place by anyone smarter than you! They just came before you, became habits and patterns of thinking for the people and wider society that raised you, and so you just kinda went along with them. You were like one of those baby elephants tied up with a string when you were too small to resist, and now that you've grown up, you're still being held in place by that little tiny string, even though you're a massive, full-grown elephant now that could easily rip it out of the ground if you believed you could. Sorry for calling you an elephant, but you know what I mean!

"The Rules" are just suggestions made up by someone else, and although many of them absolutely do have merit, you must question all of them. Especially the ones that seem too self-evidently true to be false.

They may not be true any more, if they ever were, and in business (again, just like in life), you need to be asking why that's the rule. What's it there for? What's its purpose and who proposed it? And most importantly, who does the rule benefit?

Incentives rule the world, and the status quo exists to serve the purposes of the people who built the structure. Rules often serve the people who made them up, and not you. So push back against them. Question them. Challenge them, and see if they're there for a good reason, or if they're just dust and smoke to serve the interests of the already powerful.

#9: Pick Fights and Get Paid

You can only create fierce loyalty and enthusiasm by inspiring strong emotions, and once you set out to do that, you'll inevitably create at least two distinct groups: people who love you, and people who f*cking hate you.

You literally can't have one without the other, and the worst outcome possible isn't that people should feel strong hatred towards you, but rather that they feel nothing at all. Like Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And we can say along with Oscar that the only thing worse than being hated is not being hated.

Not being hated means that nobody cares about you and your brand, message, and ideals. And this is another Key Idea that's super easy to misunderstand, because it's not about going out of your way to make people despise you; it's about being comfortable with it when it happens of its own accord, as a natural consequence of you showing up powerfully and effectively in the world.

It's also not about being rude, disrespectful, or needlessly antagonizing. But you have to be willing to take a stand and risk offending people, annoying them, or whatever else. Because if you're not willing to risk that, you'll end up playing it so safe and sterilized that your message will never be heard at all.

There are several books I'd recommend that go deeper into this idea (and that can help make you a ton of money in business), and they are: Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David, How to Start a Cult, by Jody Raynsford, and So Good They Call You a Fake, by Joshua Lisec.

#10: Deserving It Won't Make It Happen

No one is going to pick you. No, you have to choose yourself first. "Place the crown on your own head" is a recurring theme of this book, because it's so important to understand if you want to build a wildly profitable business.

Don't worry about seeming arrogant to the people who don't matter (which is basically everybody). They can't "stop you" from being successful! There's no "mystical force" keeping you down, toiling away in obscurity...it's you. It's your comfort level, your unwillingness to put yourself out there, and your hesitancy to stand up and say "I am."

People want to follow the person who's most self-assured about where they're going, and yes, that requires a certain degree of arrogance and undeniable self-assurance. It's a magnetic quality, and people are desperate to follow those who possess it. As always, you have to ask the question: "Why not me?"

#11: Great Businesspeople Steal

I'll make a slight confession right here: some of my most viral reels on Instagram and posts on other platforms were inspired by other creators, with only slight adjustments (and hopefully improvements) to make them my own.

On YouTube, for example, I'll literally use the same video title as another creator who got massive views by using that same title. It's also perfectly okay to do so. There's no "copyright" on YouTube titles, and there are hundreds (probably thousands) of videos titled something like "I Read XYZ Number of Books on Money - Here's What Will Make You Rich." And no doubt you've seen videos like "How YouTube Changed My Life (With Less Than XYZ Subscribers)"?

Yeah: you can just...take that title. No one's going to come after you. You can make a better video than they did (that's the goal!), and then rake in views and AdSense dollars for years and years. It's called the "Skyscraper Technique," which I'll explain a little bit further down.

On Instagram, I once saw a reel about the best critical thinking books, and that reel got 250,000 views for the original creator. I created my own version of that video (using my own book recommendations, my own footage, my own caption, etc.) and my video got 1,000,000 views! And then you know what I did?

I reposted it several months later (after my current followers probably forgot about it, and my new followers hadn't seen it yet), and it got millions more views! I didn't invent anything! Sure, I had to read the books, offer my expert recommendations, etc. But I didn't have to come up with some "revolutionary" video format myself. I just used what works...and it worked.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that you should keep reusing something over and over and over again until it stops working!

For example, in the Facebook Ads Library you can literally see every ad that's posted on Meta. They give you a whole bunch of useful information inside the Ads Manager too, which gives you a ton of insight into what's working already for other advertisers. And you can bet that if a particular ad has been running for months and months at a time, that ad probably prints money.

Knowing that, you can adopt elements of that advertisement for your own offer (it could even be from a completely different niche) and incorporate it into your own ad creative. This is called the Skyscraper Technique, where you basically take what's already been done well, and then you add to it - pile on top of it - to make it better and better. That's what I did with that Instagram reel, by the way. I took the original format, saw ways that I could make improvements, then added my own unique spin to it. The result? Millions of views and thousands of new followers.

Remember, like I always say: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." And I swear that I've never heard of Pablo Picasso :)

#12: Easy Money Buys the Same Amount of Stuff as Hard-Earned Money

People have this strange sense of guilt about getting paid the easy way, when they really shouldn't. The truth is that nobody cares. Unless it was unethical or slimy or underhanded in some way, "easy-earned" money is accepted at just as many locations as "hard-earned" money. The spending power is literally the same.

Life is hard enough, and so you should take all the easy money you can get! Provided it's done in an ethical manner, ideally in the spirit of service and contribution. Which, coincidentally, is literally how value is created. You make other people's lives better in some way, you improve them, and they pay you money for that! Whether that's "hard-earned" or "easy-earned" is immaterial.

The bottom line is that guilt has no place in a well-run, values-first business. You may have unfair advantages that other people don't have, and of course there are people with unfair advantages that you don't have (and you should totally use every last unfair advantage you can find), but if you have a mental block, a script that's telling you that making money should be "hard," then I'm sorry to say, making money is going to be very hard for you!

#13: Run Experiments and Test Hypotheses

Another unspoken "rule" that most people don't think to question is that you should never, ever give up. Well that's just dumb, and I'll tell you why!

You can try to hammer in a nail by using a chainsaw, or...and stay with me on this one...you could use a hammer! If someone told you that using a chainsaw is how you put nails in boards, and you kept at it, for hours, "never giving up," well you're just doing it the stupid way. Give up, and try something else!

Successful entrepreneurs run experiments and split-tests, and we do so without being too hung up on "having the right answer" from the beginning. That's why we test things! We want to get to the right answer, but we don't care whether or not it's the answer we already have, or if there's a better way we haven't seen yet. So we run split-tests, talk to customers, try things, launch products, etc. We're trying to be directionally correct, without putting undue pressure on ourselves to have everything figured out from the very beginning.

If something doesn't work, it's not that you failed (necessarily), it's just that you found one way that didn't work. Like Thomas Edison and his 1,000+ iterations of the lightbulb. He didn't "fail" 1,000 times, he just found 1,000 ways that didn't work. Edison gave up more than a thousand times!

Then again, there's another side to this. A counterargument. You can't give up too quickly either! Maybe it's not that it "didn't work," but that it didn't work yet. You can't just post 10 YouTube videos and conclude that "YouTube doesn't work for me." Define what "success" looks like to you, commit to posting 100+ videos, making small, 1% improvements to each video, and then see where you stand.

#14: “They Just Got Lucky”

We create the majority of our own luck through our movements and actions. We can increase the likelihood of becoming lucky - expand our "luck surface area" - by stacking the probabilities in our favor. And we can do this without worrying or caring about the size of anyone else's luck surface area. We can run our own race.

Some people have rich family members, astonishing good looks, off-the-charts intelligence, a key person of influence who believed in them at exactly the right time, or have experienced a one-in-a-million chance encounter that changed everything for them. Some people were born at the right place and at the right time, and some people ended up at the right place at the right time later on in life, but none of that makes a difference to you and your success. Whatsoever.

In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that you should be happy for other people's good fortune and that they should experience unbelievable good luck, because there's more than enough to go around, and the fact that someone else made it means that you can make it too. Provided, of course, that you make your own luck, by actively seeking out opportunities and stacking up your competitive advantages as consistently as possible.

The bottom line is that peering over into the other lane and inspecting all the lucky breaks that somebody else got is only going to slow you down. Again, run your own race. Dig deeper, make big, bold moves in the direction of your desires, and run as fast as you can to the places where good luck is most likely to show up.

#15: “The Rushing Sickness”

There's another amazing book that I highly recommend, The Hypomanic Edge, by John D. Gartner, that goes into this as well.

The prefix "hypo" comes from the Greek word meaning "under" or "below," and in the term hypomania, it indicates a state that is less intense or below full-blown mania. Hypomania therefore refers to a milder form of mania, characterized by elevated mood, increased activity, or energy levels, but without the extreme behaviors or impaired judgment typically seen in full mania.

The author's argument is that any immigrant population is more likely to be seeded with people who could be characterized as hypomanic, given the energy, drive, motivation, and willingness to take risks necessary to pick up everything, brave unforeseen and unimaginable dangers, and attempt to settle an entirely new country. Incidentally, since America is a nation of immigrants, Gartner hypothesized that many of the people who built that country likely suffered from hypomania, and he went on to study the lives of people like Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton and others to prove this was the case.

Okay, so what does this have to do with business and making money? Well, money loves speed, and the hypomanic, afflicted with the "rushing sickness," is highly motivated to get after it. Hypomanics move move move - they take bold, aggressive action, and they seize the initiative wherever and whenever possible.

This is the approach that most successful businesspeople take as well, regardless of whether or not they'd meet the medical criteria for hypomania per se. You see this in the Napoleon biography as well. General Bonaparte couldn't sit still! He traveled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles over the course of his life, wrote tens of thousands of letters, proclamations, commands, and orders, and through his sheer relentlessness brought the entire continent of Europe to its knees.

You don't have to conquer a continent or found a country - you don't "have to" do anything - but in business it literally pays to move fast. It pays to move forward relentlessly, and to leave your competition bewildered and delirious in the dust.

#16: Leverage "Other People's Customers" (OPC)

#17: You Actually Can Get Rich Quick

Get rich quick exists, but get rich easy does not. Of course, it all depends on your definition of "quick." MJ DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane, makes the distinction between the slow lane to wealth (patiently saving and investing), and the fast lane: entrepreneurship.

But even for him, "quick" means 5-10 years. And that is quick! I mean, it's very possible to start and sell a business for millions of dollars and to do this in less than five years. Sometimes it happens in one, sometimes it happens in ten, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but it's tough to get rich earning 0.02% interest on money sitting in the bank. You can save your way to wealth, sure, but it's not going to be quick. And certainly, wheelchairs don't fit inside the trunks of Lamborghinis.

It also depends on what "a lot of money" means to you. If $1,000,000 is a lot of money for you (and it would be for most people), it doesn't have to take you 10+ years to build a business that brings in that amount of profit per year. Profit, not just revenue.

If it's $1,000,000,000 you're after (and if so, I really have to question whether you've priced out what your dreams actually cost - either that, or you're most likely being driven by ego and insecurity), well obviously that's going to take a lot longer, and for most people it'll never happen, regardless of how "motivated" they are or how much they "grind."

I mean what's stopping you from building a company valued at "just" $3,000,000 and selling it within the next five years? Even after taxes, you could basically be retired for the rest of your life if you invested your money appropriately (slow lane) and lived well within your means.

But this whole idea of "You'd better be careful! Don't want to move ahead too fast!" is mostly promulgated by slow people who will never get rich at any speed, just like Dan says in the quote above. Again, it's all about nuance and critical thinking here. It's not "lottery ticket" thinking, or gambling, or whatever else, but rather a reality distortion field of sorts that you enter and that most people simply wouldn't understand. Slow people can't comprehend speed, and if you want to make a lot of money faster than they'd ever thought possible, you can. Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's impossible. Smile politely, then do it anyway.

#18: Gather Unstoppable Momentum at All Costs

Dan Kennedy writes in several places of what he calls THE PHENOMENON, something I'm experiencing in my business right now actually. What he's referring to is a period of time when money is coming in quickly and easily; opportunities are presenting themselves left and right - more than you know what to do with - and it seems like nothing can slow you down.

If you suddenly find yourself experiencing THE PHENOMENON, while it's here you've got to capitalize on it, double down on it, throw your full weight into your current strategy, and squeeze every last drop of life out of the opportunities you've been given. Move fast. Move with speed and deadly precision (and gratitude), or else THE PHENOMENON will pick itself up and go visit someone else.

Remember: money loves speed. Money loves people who take bold (yet calculated) risks and massive action, and you can trigger THE PHENOMENON in your own life by following up on every single opportunity and chance that's presented to you.

Myself, I literally write them down. Every promising opportunity, connection, and chance I have to make exhilarating forward progress on my current goals. I also review my Opportunities List every single day and make sure to move them all forward. And I make sure that I am moving FAST.

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