17y/o Student, Time to Change Lanes and Actually Step On The Gas

[Deleted64095]

Hi everyone,

My name is Leo and I'm a 17-year-old high school student (freezing cold chicago suburbs, s/o @ MJ). To start, I'm really glad I found TMF and this forum. I remember stumbling across a thread on this forum by Fox back when I was 14 or 15, but I didn't dive deep enough to discover the book and join the forum. As I read TMF, I started to think about looking back on now from the future. Rather than recalling inaction as I do with my younger self, I want to commit to starting a "process" of actual action and development that I can proudly look back on in the future.

My Story

I'm the grandson of hard-working German immigrants on both sides of my family, who built their successful businesses in steel and real estate from virtually nothing, only hard work. Unfortunately, I never met these ancestors since they passed away. While I admire my parents for their hard work, they are essentially living in the Slowlane, which I am increasingly afraid of entering. I don't want to grow old stressing over money and worrying that I can't retire.

When I think of my ancestors and how they succeeded, I feel that I need to develop a skill (of course with proper entry, control, CENTS, etc) that has actual and scalable value.

As I poorly attempted to find that path when I was younger, I stumbled upon things like dropshipping, but quickly found a distaste for the popular scams that involved selling useless chinese trinkets on Shopify. As I look back now, I realize that these were "get rich easy" schemes, not true fastlane pursuits that involved actual work and entry barrier.

I became disillusioned with entrepreneurship after only finding people that wanted to sell me a course when I tried to learn from online resources, so I strayed away from my dreams until last month when I saw a friend of mine reading TMF at school, actually.

I read the book nonstop over a weekend, even playing the audiobook in the background so I could fully absorb the material. I loved it and it made total sense to me as I looked on at the Slowlane future that teachers and parents preach.

I then made this account and immediately revisited that Fox gold thread about web development that I stumbled upon years ago. I became invested in that thread to the point that I forgot to make this intro, so pardon my 2-week delay since my join date.

Plans
Over the past two weeks, I've been trying to decide on an appropriate avenue for developing a Fastlane business. I've just barely started learning how code per that Fox thread I mentioned (only somewhat know HTML and CSS as of now), but I'm not sure where besides web development I should look for an opportunity at building a Fastlane business. Is e-commerce/wholesale actually a legitimate thing that I could get into without a product of my own (the entry level seems suspicious to me)? Would that even be possible with the measly couple thousand in funds I have? Copywriting? Freelance stuff to bootstrap? Somehow using my hobby of weightlifting as a (questionably profitable) niche? I'm not sure where to go at this point, but I definitely won't let it stop me. I'd love to hear what you guys would recommend in my position.

Thanks for reading, thanks to MJ for TMF, and I look forward to contributing and learning here on the forum.

 

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