Monthly Archives: December 2020

MJ DeMarco The Millionaire Fastlane Book Review

What is invisible to the EYE? According to MJ Demarco, it’s the Fastlane road to wealth.

A Fastlane? A highway? A fast way to wealth? Isn’t the title a bit suspicious? DeMarco doesn’t care, he built his Empire, his online tribe (The FastLane Forum) around it and the guy keeps going. And it’s all encapsulated in the preface of The Millionaire Fastlane when he says:

Thankfully, your belief (or disbelief) of Fastlane strategy doesn’t change my reality; it only changes yours. Let me repeat: What you think of the Fastlane doesn’t change my reality; its purpose is to change yours.

We all have our own revelations and Eureka moments in our lives. The author traces it back to his teenage years. Back then he encountered a young man driving a Lamborghini Countach and asked how he could afford such a car. “I’m an inventor,” the young man replied.

For DeMarco himself back then, the Lamborghini symbolized wealth, happiness, and freedom.

The book itself represents a trending cult nowadays that revolts against the traditional old school approach to creating wealth, and against the 401K, against the “go to college and get a job and save 10% of you income…”

That burning question: How do You get rich?

If you aren’t wealthy, STOP doing what you’re doing. STOP following the conventional wisdom. STOP following the crowd and using the wrong formula. STOP following the roadmap that forsakes dreams and leads to mediocrity. STOP traveling roads with punitive speed limits and endless detours. I call it “anti-advice,” and much of this book follows this prescription.

The Millionaire FastLane isn’t only a book compromised of words and sentences grouped together. There are equations too. Equations relating to assets, to profits and to leverage.

MJ Demarco walks us through his wealth building philosophy using simple and easy to get definitions and equations. You don’t have to hack through a verbiage when reading the book.

His Favorite Equation?

Wealth = Net Profit + Asset Value

Throughout the book, the author is continually making a distinction between two groups: Slowlaners and Fastlaners. The former focus on Creating Assets and Raising Net Profit, and the latter focus on getting a job and saving 10% per month for 40 years or more and THEN retiring.

He challenges us into thinking about creating our own Money Making Systems instead of relying on a paycheck and putting all our eggs in one basket, to recruit what he calls our “Freedom Fighters”:

DeMarco also explains what he calls The Law of Effection (Not The Law of Attraction), which basically translates to: If you want to make millions of dollars, affect the lives of millions of people.

He encourages us to Operate as a Corporation. To control your vehicle—you he points out—you must establish a setup that pays you first and the government last.

Every dollar saved is another freedom fighter in your army. If your money is fighting for you, your time is freed and you break the equation of “time for money.”

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Sean Platt & Johnny Truant’s Write. Publish. Repeat. Book Review

I like how Sean Platt and Johnny Truant collaborate with each other to continuously produce valuable work.

In Write. Publish. Repeat. Platt and Johnny clarify from the beginning that in order to ‘make it’ as a self-published author, you must approach this venture—the writing—as a business, your books/writing as your products, and the reader as a buyer.

As much as there is a lot of valuable advice within this wonderful book, there is also a great deal of focus on the marketing and promotional side that every aspiring author who wants to ‘make it’ has to go through and do it as good as—if not better than—traditional publishers.

Still, with Platt & Truant focus’  on the promotional side, they didn’t ignore the inevitable reality, the ongoing necessity for any writer to continue producing a constant flow of work, an output; This approach of focusing on continually putting your work out there and forcing oneself to ship everyday reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s approach to it too. This is definitely a wonderful book for any aspiring writer. I like it when Sean Platt and Johnny Truant sum up the core ideas for their book:

Write great stuff, get that great stuff out into the world, connect with your readers, and then do that same thing over and over and over again.
In other words: Write. Publish. Repeat.

Write. Publish. Repeat.

Platt and Truant are JA Konrath on steroids. They share with him their ability to put out great work out there often, but with the promotional side. Konrath believes in luck. They don’t! They are super optimistic about the publishing landscape:

THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BETTER time to be an indie.

Write. Publish. Repeat.

I like their honesty too. They are not here to promise you a get-rich-quick scheme or anything of that nature, and they make it clear from the start of the book. They’ve been through the process themselves, and they know that while the rewards can be huge and beyond one’s imaginations and wildest dreams, it is still a long-term game: a game that requires patience, passion, and perseverance.

If you have a few books (or only one) and aren’t planning to write more, you’re as doomed today, during the e-book revolution, as you would have been during the query-and-hope days.


Write. Publish. Repeat.

Platt & Truant emphasize the importance of the quantity of your work/output in the marketplace—though, also not ignoring the quality. And this is applicable for both fiction and nonfiction indie authors. And, in my estimation, the greatest part of Write. Publish. Repeat. is the appendix at the end of the book where they interviewed some of the most successful indie authors like Joanna Penn and Hugh Howey.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you can support my work by buying me a book (one time donation) or by becoming a patron.

 
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You Need To Start Stretching Now: Here Are The Benefits


But, if they do not stretch, with the passing of time, their bodies will become clumsier, more painful, incapable, etc. It is of no use to look at oneself in the mirror and not stop asking the reasons why, one needs to exercise or stretch, until one feels “in shape” again . This feeling of being in good shape is so imperceptible that one only becomes aware of it once it has been lost. Therefore, the smart thing to do is to not abandon it.


Stretching Exercises Encyclopedia, (2012, 1st edition).

Start Stretching Now!

You need to start stretching now. Preferably, on a daily basis—if you can. Forgetting about stretching is a common mistake we all commit. Perhaps, we build up the mileage or load up the bar. We feel that we are thriving until injuries, stiffness and fatigue knock our door.

During his career as an ultramarathoner and a navy seal, David Goggins experienced many injuries followed by many surgeries. I’ve heard him talk about stretching and how it changed–not only his athletic performance and how he feels on a daily basis–his entire life. In his memoir, You Can’t Hurt Me, David says:

Thanks to all that stretching, I’m in better shape at forty-three than I was in my twenties. Back then I was always sick, wound tight, and stressed out. I never analyzed why I kept getting stress fractures. I just taped that shit up. No matter what ailed my body or my mind I had the same solution. Tape it up and move the fuck on. Now I’m smarter than I’ve ever been. And I’m still getting after it.

David Goggins, You Can’t Hurt Me.

Stretching Enhances Your Overall Flexibility and Range of Motion

According to (10.1080/07303084.2008.10598237), ” Stretching has been shown to improve flexibility, which was previously believed to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury .” Although, the same article reminds us that other research ( 10.1080/07303084.1999.10605682 ) “have suggested that stretching may decrease muscle strength, which would compromise performance.”


Courtesy of Timo Volz, Pexels

However, a study by Herman, SL and Smith, Dt, published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research ( 10.1519/jsc.0b013e318173da50 ), in which they “incorporated a 4-week” dynamic stretching warmup (DWU) into the training program of a group of collegiate wrestlers and see how it affected their overall performance. They found out that the 4-week DWU intervention they incorporated, made positive improvements “in the majority of performance measures that assessed power,speed, agility, endurance, flexibility, and strength”. And according to the same study, “Sport-specific stretching exercises should be introduced into a warm-up immediately following the 2 to 3 minutes of light activity.”

Stretching Can Prevent Injury

There are four types of stretching techniques. Static, Dynamic, Ballistic, Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation(PNF). Each has its pros and cons. And while the static option–holding a muscle in a fixed position for an extended period of time, after moving it past a certain range of motion and oftentimes anything past that point in ROM involves pain and we all experience it–is the most popular option, it is not always the most effective technique for injury prevention.

Stretching Can Relieve Pain

If you experience chronic pain, and you go visit your doctor, chances are beside drugs and scanning, he will advise you to join a yoga class. And what is yoga but a form of stretching!

” Stretching increases the flexibility of the tissues being stretched. It helps to loosen the tension in your muscles, de-stresses them, and thus helps you manage your mental stress as well, ” says Amy Stein author of Heal Pelvic Pain.

Don’t take it too far

“There are, however, reasons to be cautious about stretching to the limits of pain because of the risk of causing damage ” says Muanjai et al. ( 10.1007/s00421-017-3608-y) and so while stretching regularly may improve flexibility and increase your range of motion, don’t take it too far. The same study suggest that static stretching for a long period of time may even cause inflammation and loss of strength. So be careful and use it wisely.

Warmup for 10-15 minutes. Then, begin the stretching process immediately. Breathe in a slow rhythm that you are able to control. Do not bounce or move in a silly way lest you get yourself injured. The stretch should be gentle. You should reach a kind of pain sweet spot that you can maintain so that it is neither too easy and thus provide no stimuli nor too hard and therefore lead to injury. “The body, and in particular the body part being stretched, must not be under excessive tension, which explains why some athletes injure themselves after practicing their sport when they conclude their training with rough stretches, ” says Oscar Moran (author of this stretching encyclopedia), and hence preferably, stretch before the exercise not after it.

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Bibliography

Philip Roth’s The Humbling Book Review

Very often, the very first sentence that I begin with is not the first sentence that I end with. And in the case of The Humbling, it is.

Philip Roth
Philip Roth The Humbling Book Review
Art Work & Book Cover, Courtesy of The Publisher, Used only for review and criticism.
  • Author: Philip Roth
  • Title: The Humbling
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Published: 2009
  • Page Count: 140

“He’d lost his magic,” that’s how Philip Roth started The Humbling. Later he said, in an interview, that he’d heard about an actor who couldn’t act anymore and so he started from there.

After more than forty years since he’d come to auditions in New York, and after a successful career as a play actor—appearing in movies as well— Simon Axler found himself, at the age of sixty five, unable to do the acting, unable of even memorizing a line or two, unable to be whom he used to be.

Axler felt that now he has become naked in front of the fans and the critics and everyone. He doubted that he had had any talent at all from the start.

The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through his acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind fell as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought everyday of killing himself with the gun in the attic—a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun that he kept in the isolated farmhouse for self-defense—and still the whole thing seemed to be an act, a bad act.

Philip Roth, The Humbling.

From then onwards, Axler’s days were characterized by suffer. And the reader is taken through a tour in the life of Simon Axler as a man and as an actor, as a lover and as a depressive.

In a way, I felt while reading the novel that Roth—and from the beginning —is pushing the protagonist towards one ultimate end: suicide.

ALL AT ONCE Axler was alone in the house in the country and terrified of killing himself. Now there was nothing stopping him. Now he could go ahead and do what he’d found himself unable to do while she was still there: walk up the stairs to the attic, load the gun, put the barrel in his mouth, and reach down with his long arms to pull the trigger. The gun as the sequel to the wife.

Philip Roth, The Humbling.

Though Axler tried to love life the way he used to, tried by giving it one more shot with love and tenderness and intimacy. He tried before that to know at least why he couldn’t act anymore by getting psychoanalyzed and spending twenty six days at a psychiatric hospital. He tried and tried and tried; he failed.

There are two main characters that affected Axler’s destiny through the novel.

The first is the woman he met at the Kennedy Center while he was there for a twenty Six day psychiatric therapy. Her name is Syvil Van Buren.

At first when they met, Philip Roth clearly notified the reader that the two characters share some similiarities and have some common ground. They approached one another one another, sat down and ate their meals and talked.

Sybil Van Buren opened up to Simon Axler, about what she saw with her own eyes, when one day she came back to pick up something she’d forgotten at home and to her shock and what she discovered her husband had been probably doing to her little sweetheart without her knowing.

And so both, Axler and Van Buren, shared their inability of ending their own suffering.

And then comes Pegeen. Another character that have deeply affected Axler. She was lesbian and twenty five years younger than him. He’d known her and known her parents long before she was even born.

With Pegeen, Axler began to regain some hope. He began to change. And he changed her as well—or so he thought. He bought her new clothes. He led her into getting a new haircut; a more girly one. She moved in to live with him. They jumped into some intimate adventures.

Even when Pegeen’s parents didn’t respond well to them being together—they even seemed to accept her being lesbian over being with him; an old depressive actor who couldn’t act anymore and whose spinal and mental problems are enough to make any potential partner calculate her long term moves wisely—even then he didn’t give a damn, he didn’t care. All too well.

All too well till he wakes up one morning and Pegeen decides that it’s over. She takes her stuff from the room that she had rearranged for herself in his farmhouse. The rest is for you to discover on your own! Buy the novel.

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