In the Slowlane, just flipped the turn signal

[jazz]

The Slowlane

Hi! I'm a 27-year-old that completely bought into the Slowlane philosophy for most of his entire life from parents that fervently pushed its philosophy. Get good grades, get a good job, save your money, and retire. There was a few years of debauchery and a life detour that taught me some valuable lessons right out of high school, but I recently graduated with an engineering degree. I now work at a "good job," a job that pays well out of college with what people would consider generous benefits and vacation time for an American employer. But I soon found myself completely dissatisfied, looking for a way out.


Looking for a Way Out

I stumbled upon the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) crowd and learned that by drastically reducing my living expenses and increasing my savings rate to 60%, I could retire in as little as 12 years. The caveat is that I would be retiring with $500k, resigning my life away to living off of $20k a year. Sure, I could probably pull it off. 12 years is definitely faster than 50 years, but I felt myself slowly dying and losing my will at my job.

My next terrible conclusion was that I needed a career change into another industry. Since I always enjoyed solving programming problems and puzzles in college, I've now been studying computer science during my free time. That way, I could work at getting into an industry with higher salary caps, which would increase my savings rate or allow me to retire with just a little bit more money.

Trying to speed in the Slowlane still leaves me stuck in the Slowlane, behind all the other cars.


Can I Do More?

All my life, I wanted to make an impact on people's lives. I lied to myself on my college application essay, saying that engineering would enable me to work on technology to change people's lives. This might be true to an extent, but there's no direct value from me to anybody. I don't get to see the smile on people's faces. Do people really care where they get their gasoline from? How their plastics are manufactured? Where their photos are stored on their phone?

I started dreaming about how I would use my programming self-education to build something worthwhile to people. I wanted a life of freedom sooner, not 12 years from now. So I began chasing money, passing income strategies, golden Amazon FBA tickets, and anything else that could possibly get me out of my current situation.

And then I read The Millionaire Fastlane .


The Millionaire Fastlane

MJ's critical insights about my Slowlane mindset and the life I was trying to lead opened my eyes to what I was doing. I was deceiving myself about the control I had on my life. I was relying on a miraculous event to save me from my life and wasn't willing to attempt any work. I pretended I was taking action by stalling myself from taking any sort of real action. I've been reading and educating myself without applying any of the things I learned. For the past several days, I have witnessed how members across the forum have been taking action, and it's taught me that there's no easy way out. This is a journey I need to take. I need to take every single step myself.


The Road Forward

The biggest hurdles I need to overcome are those relating to my mindset. I've lived my entire life seeking results and validation from those results. I went through school with good grades because I was able to gain recognition from my peers and teachers. It was a lazy solution to my life, especially when I was capable of more. My free time for 25 years of my life was devoted to playing video games. I'm comfortable with studying and learning things. I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid of wasting more of my life, so I don't take any action to attempt to change it. It's stupid, and I know it.

The other false idea holding me back is the belief that I don't have worthy ideas. I'm now trying to actively seek out meaningful problems and observe the challenges people face everyday. Since I'm still at my Slowlane job, I realize now that it's an abundant opportunity to learn about corporate life.

I am going to start learning skills that will be useful for what I want to achieve. I am going to continue my programming education and focus on applicable product building skills, not the minutiae of microarchitecture and discrete mathematics. I am going to learn to write exceptional copy. And in the meantime, I will continue to develop a producer mindset and become comfortable with failure. I will seek feedback and not cower from criticism.

This is practically the first forum post I've made in 10 years because I've always been afraid of criticism. My days are so much brighter now that I have a clear direction. Thanks for reading. I hope to learn as much as I can from all of you and give where I can. Please let me know if any of what I wrote stood out to you. Let me know if there's anything I've said that you think is still holding me back.

Cheers!

 

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[GuestUser155]

I was in exactly your same situation not too long ago. I too, was afraid to fail because I thought if I didn't have the perfect solution I would be wasting time. It's great you're taking action and learning, but it can turn into mental-masturbation if that's all you do (and focus on specialties that aren't needed to be learned and can be outsourced without a hitch).

Take computer programming. There was a good thread on this here. You don't have to learn programming, all you have to learn are their problems and how to solve them (I don't mean things like P vs. NP, I'm talking tangible problems).

It happened to me too. I thought I needed to learn the in-and-outs of electrical engineering and how to create a circuit (mind-numbingly boring) so I forced myself to read those books, but I wasted so much time. I only learned that there was a better way when I heard the most circuit-making is done by Indians and for extremely cheap.

Entrepreneurs are big-picture thinkers, they don't need to involve themselves with all the minutiae (let someone smarter take care of that).

 

[458]

The Slowlane

Hi! I'm a 27-year-old that completely bought into the Slowlane philosophy for most of his entire life from parents that fervently pushed its philosophy. Get good grades, get a good job, save your money, and retire. There was a few years of debauchery and a life detour that taught me some valuable lessons right out of high school, but I recently graduated with an engineering degree. I now work at a "good job," a job that pays well out of college with what people would consider generous benefits and vacation time for an American employer. But I soon found myself completely dissatisfied, looking for a way out.


Looking for a Way Out

I stumbled upon the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) crowd and learned that by drastically reducing my living expenses and increasing my savings rate to 60%, I could retire in as little as 12 years. The caveat is that I would be retiring with $500k, resigning my life away to living off of $20k a year. Sure, I could probably pull it off. 12 years is definitely faster than 50 years, but I felt myself slowly dying and losing my will at my job.

My next terrible conclusion was that I needed a career change into another industry. Since I always enjoyed solving programming problems and puzzles in college, I've now been studying computer science during my free time. That way, I could work at getting into an industry with higher salary caps, which would increase my savings rate or allow me to retire with just a little bit more money.

Trying to speed in the Slowlane still leaves me stuck in the Slowlane, behind all the other cars.


Can I Do More?

All my life, I wanted to make an impact on people's lives. I lied to myself on my college application essay, saying that engineering would enable me to work on technology to change people's lives. This might be true to an extent, but there's no direct value from me to anybody. I don't get to see the smile on people's faces. Do people really care where they get their gasoline from? How their plastics are manufactured? Where their photos are stored on their phone?

I started dreaming about how I would use my programming self-education to build something worthwhile to people. I wanted a life of freedom sooner, not 12 years from now. So I began chasing money, passing income strategies, golden Amazon FBA tickets, and anything else that could possibly get me out of my current situation.

And then I read The Millionaire Fastlane .


The Millionaire Fastlane

MJ's critical insights about my Slowlane mindset and the life I was trying to lead opened my eyes to what I was doing. I was deceiving myself about the control I had on my life. I was relying on a miraculous event to save me from my life and wasn't willing to attempt any work. I pretended I was taking action by stalling myself from taking any sort of real action. I've been reading and educating myself without applying any of the things I learned. For the past several days, I have witnessed how members across the forum have been taking action, and it's taught me that there's no easy way out. This is a journey I need to take. I need to take every single step myself.


The Road Forward

The biggest hurdles I need to overcome are those relating to my mindset. I've lived my entire life seeking results and validation from those results. I went through school with good grades because I was able to gain recognition from my peers and teachers. It was a lazy solution to my life, especially when I was capable of more. My free time for 25 years of my life was devoted to playing video games. I'm comfortable with studying and learning things. I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid of wasting more of my life, so I don't take any action to attempt to change it. It's stupid, and I know it.

The other false idea holding me back is the belief that I don't have worthy ideas. I'm now trying to actively seek out meaningful problems and observe the challenges people face everyday. Since I'm still at my Slowlane job, I realize now that it's an abundant opportunity to learn about corporate life.

I am going to start learning skills that will be useful for what I want to achieve. I am going to continue my programming education and focus on applicable product building skills, not the minutiae of microarchitecture and discrete mathematics. I am going to learn to write exceptional copy. And in the meantime, I will continue to develop a producer mindset and become comfortable with failure. I will seek feedback and not cower from criticism.

This is practically the first forum post I've made in 10 years because I've always been afraid of criticism. My days are so much brighter now that I have a clear direction. Thanks for reading. I hope to learn as much as I can from all of you and give where I can. Please let me know if any of what I wrote stood out to you. Let me know if there's anything I've said that you think is still holding me back.

Cheers!

I'm 27 also, so maybe I can relate to you a bit better. Your issue is denial, your still in denial that everything you have accepted as true up until this point is a complete lie. The best way to destroy this denial is to realize that you tricked yourself, you tricked yourself into believing people that were not very successful in anything, but since they were close to you, you accepted there advise as fact. This starts when you are a child with your parents. When you look at this rationally and objectively, you will see that your parents are actually very average and not successful at much of anything, even though they love you, ignoring them is the only way out.

Goodluck

 

[jazz]

I was in exactly your same situation not too long ago. I too, was afraid to fail because I thought if I didn't have the perfect solution I would be wasting time. It's great you're taking action and learning, but it can turn into mental-masturbation if that's all you do (and focus on specialties that aren't needed to be learned and can be outsourced without a hitch).

Take computer programming. There was a good thread on this here. You don't have to learn programming, all you have to learn are their problems and how to solve them (I don't mean things like P vs. NP, I'm talking tangible problems).

It happened to me too. I thought I needed to learn the in-and-outs of electrical engineering and how to create a circuit (mind-numbingly boring) so I forced myself to read those books, but I wasted so much time. I only learned that there was a better way when I heard the most circuit-making is done by Indians and for extremely cheap.

Entrepreneurs are big-picture thinkers, they don't need to involve themselves with all the minutiae (let someone smarter take care of that).

Thanks for sharing your story. I really need to watch that I don't fall into the trap of wanting to learn everything. It's pretty easy for me to constantly just learn new things, and I get a lot of self-validation out of it. I tend to obsess over doing things right, but in the end, taking an algorithms course isn't getting me closer to my goal. I need to really evaluate what I'm doing.

I've decided to limit my study of coding to building static websites through templates and learning to manage a website on an existing CMS platform like Wordpress. This will enable me to build landing pages and understand how to develop business-to-consumer interactions online.

I was inspired by Fox's thread about adding substantial value to businesses through well-executed websites, and I have a couple of potential business prospects I can approach. My immediate goal is to earn extra income to fund bigger business ventures, learn useful skills along the way, and become more adept at identifying needs that I could fill. If I could break free of the 8-to-5 grind, even better.

I'm 27 also, so maybe I can relate to you a bit better. Your issue is denial, your still in denial that everything you have accepted as true up until this point is a complete lie. The best way to destroy this denial is to realize that you tricked yourself, you tricked yourself into believing people that were not very successful in anything, but since they were close to you, you accepted there advise as fact. This starts when you are a child with your parents. When you look at this rationally and objectively, you will see that your parents are actually very average and not successful at much of anything, even though they love you, ignoring them is the only way out.

Goodluck

You're right. There's still a lot of self-doubt. I still don't completely believe that I can achieve the exit I want. Despite this, I'm going to start taking steps to make progress. Not even attempting to do anything substantial at this point would haunt me forever. I think it would destroy me to continue to accept a fate as a wage slave. Thanks for the good wishes!

 

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