This is the chain of fear, and it is very strong. Fear is the main force the government uses to maintain control over us. Fear is how they compel us to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a college education that doesn’t help us get a better job. Fear is what keeps you from quitting your job. We are all afraid because it’s around us every single day. Fear is exactly what I felt when I lost my job. When you tell your spouse or you friends that you are going to quit your job, their immediate response is to use fear to keep you enslaved. They will ask what you will do for money, tell you that it’s so hard to find a new job now and give you plenty of other reasons that you shouldn’t do it. They are all fear-based reasons. I have lived a life less ordinary. I have been told over and over again that I can’t do the things that I want to do. That I’m not good enough, skilled enough, rich enough, lucky enough, good looking enough…
We believe in these chains so much that when we see someone walk away from them, it terrifies us. They shatter our reality with their behavior. If he can just walk away from the chains of fear, can I do the same thing? That is an overwhelming question. If you believe in these bonds enough, they become quite real. Every month I have to come up with a project or work on something that I created to generate income. I don’t have a steady, single revenue stream like a traditional job. Most people find that shocking and they are more afraid of my freedom than their personal enslavement. Unfortunately, most people believe that working for a large company provides security, but you won’t believe how fragile your existence actually is at a large corporation. We are taught over and over again to love our chains and to fear freedom.
The second layer of chains that wrap around you are financial. You just can’t afford to quit your job. You need that income stream to pay your rent, feed your family, and cover your medical bills. You need that health insurance in case you get sick. If you leave that job, your life will start to unravel. Eviction notices and collection agencies will start hounding you. These chains are intertwined with fear. Who isn’t afraid of getting kicked out of their house and living on the street? You can’t leave the prison until you can self-sustain. Financial chains are quite real. They aren’t as scary as fear chains but without control of your financial destiny, breaking the fear chain is meaningless.
Bills are real, and we live in a debt based society. More than fifty-five percent of Americans barely break even or spend more than they make. We start out owing a little, and every month our debt continues to increase. Credit cards were only invented a hundred years ago. They turned us from a country of people with savings to a country of people with debt. As long as you have debt hanging over your head, it’s impossible to feel true freedom.
The third layer of chains is forged from knowledge. You can’t escape the prison without a plan. You need floor plans, a guard schedule, and a getaway vehicle. What use is jumping over the wall if you are just going to be running across a field on foot? Those guys get caught every single time. Without the knowledge of how to change your financial destiny, you don’t have any hope of escape. There are a lot of books out there that’ll help you with one of these sets of chains, but you need to break through all three at once, or your escape will fail. You’ll end up back where you started, even more depressed than before.
Most of us never use what we learned in high school or college. Those schools are designed to churn out factory workers, not leaders. We were trained in obedience more than anything else. We are taught to sit in our seats and stay quiet while we do whatever the teacher tells us to. To move when the bell rings, show up on time, and be quiet. We are trained to obey our prison guards.
But for you, all that is ending right now.
3
I Could Use a Little Hope
So imagine this: I’d been injured in a car accident and was staring down a terrifying prospect – years of selling people computers they didn’t need at prices they couldn’t afford. You’ve probably been to a “tech store” like this once or twice. They mostly make their money from bilking the elderly.
And when I finally quit, the boss took it as a personal affront. How dare I leave some going-nowhere gig? She told me that nobody would ever hire me again. I was so confused by that – why get so personal, so quickly? I had nightmares for two years after that job and yet they tried to use fear to trap me. She wanted me to feel scared and powerless, to make me easier to control. We are raised to respond to fear, and every institution around us works hard to control our decisions using that power. Why? Because fear works.
Don’t believe me? Watch the news at night. Every single story is bad news. People in that business have a saying: “if it bleeds, it leads.” The more horrible the story, the more attention it gets. They always play those little snippets during the day - “something innocuous and random in your house is going to kill your children, we’ll tell you at eleven.” It’s a tactic. They use fear just to get you to watch the news. If they wanted to help you, or the danger was real, they would give you the information immediately.
The government uses fear to maintain its power, too. If we aren’t hearing about the Russians, it’s the Chinese or terrorists. There is always some new existential threat to our way of life. When it’s not swarthy foreigners planning our demise, there’s something environmental.
When I was a child, I remembered hearing story after story about the hole in the ozone layer that was going to give everyone cancer and kill us all. Let me ask you a serious question: When is the last time you even heard the phrase “hole in the ozone layer?” I bet it’s been more than a decade and probably more than two. NASA discovered the hole in the ozone layer a few months before they were about to lose a bunch of funding one year. They got the funding they wanted, and suddenly the “problem” simply disappeared.
What about global warming? Celebrities berate us, and politicians give speeches about how we are so horrible, right before they hop on private jets and burn more fuel than you will in your entire life. The same scientists who started the global warming scare in the 1980s were claiming global cooling just ten years earlier. Aren’t you a little suspicious that the same data somehow proves two opposites? The only thing that connects these two conclusions is the desire to use fear to affect your behavior.
The entire Western education system is designed to crush creativity and control you through fear. We are told that if you don’t get into a good kindergarten, you’ll never get into a good grammar school. Each step along the way you hear how you need to do more activities to improve your little baby resume so that you can build your resume at some other amazing institution.
And by the time you’re twenty-five, you have a master's degree that’s worth garbage and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Let’s do a simple analysis for just a moment to see what your education is worth. Let’s just say modestly that your education costs $250,000. That’s including room, board, food and every other collegiate and post-graduate expense. And I know that number is far too small if you are thinking about a Ph.D. or law school.
The average small business loan is $25,000. You can go to college or for the same money you can start TEN businesses. If you’ve read the statistics that the government puts out there to scare you out of starting your own business, you know that eight out of ten small businesses fail. That means you could have taken that college loan, started ten businesses, let eight of them fail and still own two thriving businesses by the time you’re in your mid-twenties.
That sounds pretty great to me!
The real problem with college is that most of what they teach you is garbage. It’s almost completely worthless in the real world. If you are going to be a doctor or lawyer, then the stuff you learn is useful. My sister has a degree in art history. She then went to law school and became a tier 1 lawyer. She works 100 hours a week. I’m not sure if that’s the American Dream for me. How often do you think there is an “art history emergency” in her law office? Where is the value in the undergraduate degree?
Al
l that work and those four years of college have zero effect on her career. Law school could just as easily start at eighteen like it does in most other civilized countries. But then how would these institutions screw you out of hundreds of thousands of dollars?
All that money. Most of what you learn is worthless in the real world. All you learn in the American education system is how to be a drone; our natural desire to learn, grow, and improve ourselves has been commoditized, exploited, and strip-mined. The education-industrial complex stamps out creativity and brilliance with rules, standardized tests, and a host of terrifying narcotics. If I had been just a few years younger, I’m sure my teachers would have used one exotic brand of tranquilizers or another to keep me quiet and drooling.
Most people who graduate from college have degrees in worthless subjects - art history, ancient Greek history, philosophy, communications, leadership, and modern feminist studies. I don’t care about the merits of learning those things. What I do know is that none of those give you skills to put food on the table. None of those translates into a real world job.
Rather than admit that they teach you garbage and charge way too much, they pour on the fear. They have to. Their industry depends on it. We hear things like “nobody will hire you without a college degree” all the time. Understand, this isn’t sour grapes from a dropout. I have a college degree and a master's. My dissertation for my master's was so good that an educational publishing house picked it up, and it’s available in print.
And yet for all that education… that fear driven education; I use less than five percent of the things I learned in college. I use absolutely NOTHING that I learned in my master's course. The main value I get from my education is that I sometimes write in different books, like this one, about how I use nothing I learned in college. And I went to an excellent school.
I graduated at twenty-one with a degree in my fist, and nobody would hire me. I got the same rude awakening most kids these days experience. You walk out of a college that tells you eighty percent of their graduates find a job…only to discover that they include jobs in the fast food industry. They include bottom-level jobs in that statistic. You can get a degree in science and end up stuffing bags at the grocery store, and the university will mark your losing job as a win in their brochures.
We are trapped in a prison of glass walls and invisible guards. The reason you don’t ask for that promotion you deserve, quit to start your own business or hop on a plane to start a life in a new country can be boiled down to one single word - FEAR.
This is a book designed to replace fear with reality.
It’s unfortunate, but the moment you tell the people around you that you’re even thinking about quitting your job or starting your own business, they get in on the game. They give you a host of reasons why it’s a foolish idea. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that they’re all fear-based reasons. And the fact is - you might not succeed. But that’s also what happens if you don’t try.
My whole life, I’ve been driven by the desire to prove people wrong. That’s probably my defining characteristic. When people tell me that I can’t do something, I have no choice but to prove them wrong. When I cross the finish line, those same doubters shove their heads in the sand and blame my accomplishments on luck. They would rather blame an imaginary force than admit that their fear was wrong.
It’s time to break the chains of fear that bind you. If you read this book until the end, you are going to have an exact sequence of steps that you can follow to achieve complete and total financial freedom.
I want to help you. I want to give you hope. Then I want to transform that desire into reality. I’ve already proven my naysayers wrong with my success. They still blame it on luck or random chance. So now I am going to do the same thing for you. I want us to work together, and stand up to the people who want to manipulate us through fear. I want to prove that my system works for ANYONE.
Your success is going to be my legacy.
4
Shatter Your Chains
This book isn’t a novel. I didn’t write it so that you could furrow your brow and hum to yourself about how nice it is and stick it back on your bookshelf. It’s a plan, and it’s a simple one. I’m going to help you break through those three layers of chains we talked about earlier. First, we are going to understand exactly where those chains of fear came from, and how to transition your mind into a place where you believe in yourself. A place where you have real confidence in your ability to master your destiny. Without this faith in yourself, you will keep seeking a new master to protect you.
We’ve already started the process of cracking those fear chains.
I will then help you to formulate a plan. We will design a strategy that allows you to open up new revenue streams. Together we will figure out exactly how much money you need to earn to leave your job behind. To get to that moment where you step through the prison gates and shout at the sun. That moment where you realize nobody can tell you what to do ever again.
We’re going to build a plan around who you are as an individual. We will assess what you already know and find a way to leverage that. The knowledge and skills inside you are the levers we will use to break open the door of your prison. You don’t need to learn anything new. You already have the knowledge inside you.
Come with me, and together, we’re going to shatter the chains that bind you.
5
What you will achieve by reading this book
This book is not designed to make you feel good. To be honest, I don’t care about your feelings.
I once worked for a charity in the United Kingdom. Fresh out of college, I got a charity gig teaching DJing at inner city schools and working in a youth cafe. I wasn’t paid a penny and had to raise support back in America. On the very first day, all of the volunteers had a little meeting. Everybody started talking in such glowing terms about how important the journey was. They wanted to make sure that we were all great friends at the end of the year. They focused on how we would work together.
I stood up and told them I disagreed. I told the other volunteers that I only care about the destination. What good is working to help those kids without tangible results? My goal was to change lives and give children with no hope something to believe in again.
At the end of my year of charity, everyone I worked with hated my guts. They spread all kinds of false rumors about me. They tried to get me kicked out of a house I had rented. They hated me on a level that… looking back, was really impressive. And yet. Every single kid that came into the cafe loved me. I was the most beloved volunteer. I had many conversations with the kids about religion and hope and the possibility of changing their lives. The rest of the staff combined had zero conversations like that all year. I know this because I asked them directly in the final meeting.
I helped a girl with cerebral palsy believe in herself again, and she ended up becoming an actress on a popular television show. I helped a kid with both parents living on welfare believe that he could break the cycle and become a successful DJ. He did.
I’m not here to tell you how great I am. My philosophy has always been the same. Feelings are secondary to success. My goal is to change your life. Your feelings are secondary to that goal.
Let me be a little more direct.
At the end of this book, I want you to make a bunch of money. That’s my only goal. A book, project or website can only have one goal if it wants to succeed. If I were trying to make you feel good and teach you how to make money, I would fail at both. If you need a book that makes you feel good while nothing in your life changes, maybe I’ll write a sequel filled with pithy quotes for you.
If you read this book to completion, you will accomplish a few critical things. The first is that you will have a set of financial plans in front of you. Something real, something written down that you can follow. We will set up three financial goals for you. Dialing in exactly how much money you need to make is imperative. People tell me all the
time that they want to be rich. That’s a lovely word with absolutely no meaning. I deal in specifics. How much money do you need to make every month to live your dream life? That’s the goal we’re after.
The second thing you are going to design is an actionable plan to profits. We are going to figure out the exact skill or talent that you are going to develop and leverage to start making money FAST. There is something that you are excellent at that other people want to learn. Don’t tell me I’m wrong right now. I’ve done this exercise with hundreds of people in person, and I always find their marketable skill within five minutes. If you don’t believe in yourself yet, just shut up and wait until we get to that chapter. Let me make you wealthy, and then you can complain.
The third thing is that you are going to find a market. You are going to know exactly how to find people who want to give you money in exchange for access to your unique skill, talent or knowledge. With a skill and a market, the money will flow into your bank almost like magic. This step is the one that many entrepreneurs struggle with. How many people have a great product that nobody has ever heard of?
My entire life people have been telling me all the things that I can’t do. I can’t start my own business. Nobody will ever pay me hundreds of dollars just to go out drinking with me for a few hours. I can’t live on a tropical island. I’m too young for this and too old for that…
I’ve proven thousands of people wrong and if right now you think I can’t change your financial destiny, then sit down, do the work, and prepare to be proven wrong.
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 2