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Hello fellow aspiring unplugged unscriptees,
I want to start by saying I have been loosely aware of the Fastlane community for quite a few years. I was even recommended checking it out 5 or so years ago around the time I had my ‘FTE’ moment and started trying to take the act of liberating myself from the rat race seriously.
Let’s just say I was a bit like Jeff in The Great Rat-race escape side story after he blew $1400 on those t-shirts. Had I taken @MJ DeMarco ’s books seriously back then I may have saved at least 3 years and a 5 figure sum of money as well as my dignity.
At that time I was full of greed, selfishness and had dollar signs in my pupils. The concept of delivering genuine value to millions and making the world a better place was lost on me.
What panned out over the past few years was nothing I didn’t deserve and in retrospect I the lessons told in TMF and Unscripted hit home firmer than I ever could have imagined after being through the slaughterhouse of guru scammers and low-hanging fruit, over-saturated business models.
4 years ago I finally pulled the plug on my ‘job’ which was working as an oil/gas/wind-farm lackey on ships for a company that wanted to squeeze every last ounce of blood out of me when I wasn’t working offshore – being summoned to do grunt work in the office and workshop without any extra pay at the boss’s whim. Tolerating a toxic working environment which felt like being back at high school with the bullies. And having to spend 12+ hours every single day sharing the same oxygen as these people I grew to despise – far longer than with family or people I actually like spending time with.
It was pure torture for my soul and when I say I ‘pulled the plug’ I kind of did but kind of didn’t.
Ever since the start of 2019 I have been doing the same job on the ships but as a freelancer. Sporadic, contract only consultant work being paid per day and ultimately the same job with most of the drawbacks. The realistic ceiling of income I could earn in a year for about 180 days work is about 100k usually without the need for paying tax due to my residency status etc. being out of the country so long etc. (the one real bonus). My tentative goal is to split my time between various countries in Latin America.
I remember not having a clue at all what to do regarding getting from ‘unplugged unscriptee’ to ‘fastlane unscriptee.’ I was there psychologically but I didn’t know what to actually ‘do.’
I had a look at these Fastlane forums and read the gold threads etc but being selectively blind and arrogant as I was I didn’t see the value. Nothing immediately applicable.
I wanted easy, quick money asap so I could put working on the ship to rest, never have to work with anyone I didn’t like again and live wherever I wanted earning location independent passive income yadyyadyyah. I didn’t really care too much how I did it.
Initially, I kind of sort of dabbled in low value, Alibaba style drop shipping – you know the usual low hanging fruit every Tom, Dick and Harry and their dog was doing. Like Jeff in The Great Ratrace Escape.
Managed to get my facebook account permanently banned while trying to follow some ‘6 figures quick facebook ads course.’ To this day I haven’t been able to do anything about it.
2020 arrived with that big event we are all familiar with.
I woke up a lot about how the world works and the harrowing truth about what the elites want for our future. I won’t go all conspiracy nut don’t worry but to me it is obvious we are heading down a very dark path rich in dystopian Orwellian nightmares such as looming CBDCs, digital IDs, ESGs, climate-change/carbon agendas, smart 15 minute cities etc. As my awareness of these intimidating inevitabilities increased, so did my intense desire to become financially free before its too late.
Anyway, I decided to spent my ‘off time’ going all out – working 10 hours a day without fail trying to find a solution to ‘evading the great reset’ and not ending trapped.
I did another course teaching google ads with high ticket drop shipping selling expensive home items like fire pits etc. I remember feeling like a real boss phoning up manufacturers and suppliers and convincing them to let me sell their products on my shopify site. Google trends said the niche was on an upward trajectory and with lots of people trapped at home with nothing to do but to spend money would love to have an expensive firepit in their gardens, so I reasoned.
For a brief period it worked – I was making a handful of 1-2k sales with 400-500 buck commissions.
Then it died as demand just vanished. I also allowed myself to get scammed with this snake-oil google ads account managing company who despite clearly seeing no sales and nothing we were doing with keywords worked, still insisted on charging me an arm and a leg for several months. It was a sickening experience.
While that whole endeavour petered out, a new shiny object had stolen my attention. I ended up spending 2k on a youtube ads course ironically coming from a youtube ad on youtube itself.
Next thing you know I am creating dozens upon dozens of youtube ads selling clickbank ‘lose 50lbs a month’ ‘and cure tinnitus in 30 days’ garbage thinking I was going to scale it to the moon and retire by age 32.
For a short time it actually looked like it was going to work. I was making sales and could sleep well at night as the products had 2 month money back guarantees. I couldn’t scale though as the ROI was never high enough to make that possible.
So I spent the whole summer of 2022 working ship jobs back to back to save 15k for a ‘mentorship’ where a former student who made 4 million dollars revenue would coach me once a week for 2 months.
Within 3 weeks of her coaching, I broke 1k/day revenue (about half of it profit). My mentor told me nonchalantly something to the effect of ‘yeah you’ll be making 5 figures a day before the coaching is up, fasten your seatbelt.’
And a day later, Google banned my account for circumventing systems. No matter what I did I was unable to solve this issue and wasn’t willing to go down some rather shady ‘grey area’ paths to get a new account. Even if I did it seemed pointless as Big Tech is only getting smarter by the day and their algorithms even more savvy. A classic job proxy I believe MJ calls this…
November 2022 came and I had a series of calamitous nervous breakdowns and ended up becoming a severe alcoholic for 3 months straight (the effects of which I still feel to this day). I had never abused alcohol like that in my life. I was feeling suicidal several times.
I had given myself my word that by the time my 34th birthday arrived (which corresponded to working TEN years offshore) I would become liberated from the rat race, never have a boss again and split my time between several different countries in a location independent manner and finally start enjoying life without worrying every night about the great reset.
And then Google smashed my dreams with one fell swoop. Or rather I did by trying to run a 'job proxy' business.
To make matters worse, I had gotten very arrogant during the last ship job I had done and started standing up for myself in a way that even surprises me. Around the time of the google ads ban, I was alerted by my agent that the client had suspended me for ‘aggressive behaviour’ and a list of other accusations.
During the alcoholic period in that old man pub I had stationed myself at, I desperately tried 2 other ‘making money quick’ schemes pedalled by gurus who truly awoke me to the humbling reality of how the scammer economy online works.
I tried making a ‘brand ambassador’ blog using AI tools to write articles, and paying 300 bucks a month on SEO software etc. I think I made 60 bucks between then and now and according to google search console 75% of my 400+ articles are de-indexed. Despite the course owner saying there was a year long money-back guarantee, this turned out to be a lie and I was never refunded.
Finally, I tried this ‘email marketing’ program (or e-farming as the owner called it) where you build a list using solo ads traffic (basically traffic from other people’s lists) and sell garbage from clickbank, JVZoo and Warriorplus.
In a truly atrocious moment of greed and delusion I paid the e-farming guru 22.5k (most of the money I had left) to build the list for me with his ‘top quality hot leads.’
What followed was a torturous 3 months of combat with them where they refused to accept the reality that their traffic was utter rubbish that caused the autoresponder to have 0-1% open rates and get flooded by spam complaints. Luckily, I only lost 4k or so and got the rest back from them (though they framed it as them ‘making an exception for me’ which was hilarious).
Just as a side note, to illustrate just how insanely high I was on greed and selfishness over the past few years, I lost 45k playing crypto futures trading back in 2021 when the massive crash in May 2021 liquidated all my positions (nope I wasn't using stop losses).
Fast forward to today, I have been working at sea once again just to pay the bills and have a 5 figure sum of cash in my accounts. My net worth, while positive at least, is less than it was in 2020.
During this process I finally managed to kick the alcoholism for good (and nicotine which I acquired at sea).
Now I finally ‘get it.’
I listened to the audiobook ‘TFM’ offshore and later read the actual book once on dry land.
I then read Unscripted and am now finishing ‘The Great Rat-race Escape.’
Now I see precisely why I got my a$$ handed to me so brutally over the past 3-4 years.
I was doing literally everything wrong, and I didn’t even know it.
And I believe wholeheartedly I deserved it all.
I wasn’t doing this to make the world a better place. I wasn’t doing it to deliver genuine value to people’s lives.
It was all me, me me.
And I was punished for it. And deservedly so.
Now today I am not in the best of mental health. I am rather pessimistic about the future. I wrestle with a daily sense of nihilism and apathy.
But I am improving day by day. I am eating healthy food everyday, not drinking, took up boxing and hit the gym 6 days a week. I am also fortunate to have an amazing girlfriend and relationship which is worth its weight in gold.
I won’t hold back – while I have read the books and understand CENTS as well as the vast myriad of titbits MJ DeMarco has propagated through his teachings; I still feel paralysed.
I am struck down with fear, apathy and hopelessness. I am working on that of course, slowly but surely. I guess my biggest fear is simply failing again while having what feels like a very limited amount of time left.
In particularly, I am put off by the immense importance of using Big Tech for business success, specifically when it comes to soft and hard proofing potential products. I am trying to envisage a scenario where I am able to produce something of real value to give to the world without relying on Big Tech (Google and Facebook are no longer options for my use any longer).
Without Google or Facebook to test ideas during the proof stages of the execution procedure, I am not really sure what to do. But I am committed to finding a solution.
As per MJ’s list of instructions when I signed up here, I am going to proceed onto the next steps after reading the books which is to read the top viewed and gold threads. I will join the INSIDERS community as well. And I will choose a few of those recommended books from that pdf to delve into.
By hook or by crook, come hell or high-water I will succeed.
I refuse to believe I have nothing to offer humanity. That I can’t make the world a superior place compared to before I came along.
I don’t have a choice. I cannot justify starting a family with my girlfriend as long as I am anchored (see what I did there lol) to this ship job which isn’t even stable and probably won’t exist in 3 years where I’d only see my kids half the year.
Thank you for reading my story and hopefully some people learned something about greed and the importance of not drowning in it as a money chaser.
I want to start by saying I have been loosely aware of the Fastlane community for quite a few years. I was even recommended checking it out 5 or so years ago around the time I had my ‘FTE’ moment and started trying to take the act of liberating myself from the rat race seriously.
Let’s just say I was a bit like Jeff in The Great Rat-race escape side story after he blew $1400 on those t-shirts. Had I taken @MJ DeMarco ’s books seriously back then I may have saved at least 3 years and a 5 figure sum of money as well as my dignity.
At that time I was full of greed, selfishness and had dollar signs in my pupils. The concept of delivering genuine value to millions and making the world a better place was lost on me.
What panned out over the past few years was nothing I didn’t deserve and in retrospect I the lessons told in TMF and Unscripted hit home firmer than I ever could have imagined after being through the slaughterhouse of guru scammers and low-hanging fruit, over-saturated business models.
4 years ago I finally pulled the plug on my ‘job’ which was working as an oil/gas/wind-farm lackey on ships for a company that wanted to squeeze every last ounce of blood out of me when I wasn’t working offshore – being summoned to do grunt work in the office and workshop without any extra pay at the boss’s whim. Tolerating a toxic working environment which felt like being back at high school with the bullies. And having to spend 12+ hours every single day sharing the same oxygen as these people I grew to despise – far longer than with family or people I actually like spending time with.
It was pure torture for my soul and when I say I ‘pulled the plug’ I kind of did but kind of didn’t.
Ever since the start of 2019 I have been doing the same job on the ships but as a freelancer. Sporadic, contract only consultant work being paid per day and ultimately the same job with most of the drawbacks. The realistic ceiling of income I could earn in a year for about 180 days work is about 100k usually without the need for paying tax due to my residency status etc. being out of the country so long etc. (the one real bonus). My tentative goal is to split my time between various countries in Latin America.
I remember not having a clue at all what to do regarding getting from ‘unplugged unscriptee’ to ‘fastlane unscriptee.’ I was there psychologically but I didn’t know what to actually ‘do.’
I had a look at these Fastlane forums and read the gold threads etc but being selectively blind and arrogant as I was I didn’t see the value. Nothing immediately applicable.
I wanted easy, quick money asap so I could put working on the ship to rest, never have to work with anyone I didn’t like again and live wherever I wanted earning location independent passive income yadyyadyyah. I didn’t really care too much how I did it.
Initially, I kind of sort of dabbled in low value, Alibaba style drop shipping – you know the usual low hanging fruit every Tom, Dick and Harry and their dog was doing. Like Jeff in The Great Ratrace Escape.
Managed to get my facebook account permanently banned while trying to follow some ‘6 figures quick facebook ads course.’ To this day I haven’t been able to do anything about it.
2020 arrived with that big event we are all familiar with.
I woke up a lot about how the world works and the harrowing truth about what the elites want for our future. I won’t go all conspiracy nut don’t worry but to me it is obvious we are heading down a very dark path rich in dystopian Orwellian nightmares such as looming CBDCs, digital IDs, ESGs, climate-change/carbon agendas, smart 15 minute cities etc. As my awareness of these intimidating inevitabilities increased, so did my intense desire to become financially free before its too late.
Anyway, I decided to spent my ‘off time’ going all out – working 10 hours a day without fail trying to find a solution to ‘evading the great reset’ and not ending trapped.
I did another course teaching google ads with high ticket drop shipping selling expensive home items like fire pits etc. I remember feeling like a real boss phoning up manufacturers and suppliers and convincing them to let me sell their products on my shopify site. Google trends said the niche was on an upward trajectory and with lots of people trapped at home with nothing to do but to spend money would love to have an expensive firepit in their gardens, so I reasoned.
For a brief period it worked – I was making a handful of 1-2k sales with 400-500 buck commissions.
Then it died as demand just vanished. I also allowed myself to get scammed with this snake-oil google ads account managing company who despite clearly seeing no sales and nothing we were doing with keywords worked, still insisted on charging me an arm and a leg for several months. It was a sickening experience.
While that whole endeavour petered out, a new shiny object had stolen my attention. I ended up spending 2k on a youtube ads course ironically coming from a youtube ad on youtube itself.
Next thing you know I am creating dozens upon dozens of youtube ads selling clickbank ‘lose 50lbs a month’ ‘and cure tinnitus in 30 days’ garbage thinking I was going to scale it to the moon and retire by age 32.
For a short time it actually looked like it was going to work. I was making sales and could sleep well at night as the products had 2 month money back guarantees. I couldn’t scale though as the ROI was never high enough to make that possible.
So I spent the whole summer of 2022 working ship jobs back to back to save 15k for a ‘mentorship’ where a former student who made 4 million dollars revenue would coach me once a week for 2 months.
Within 3 weeks of her coaching, I broke 1k/day revenue (about half of it profit). My mentor told me nonchalantly something to the effect of ‘yeah you’ll be making 5 figures a day before the coaching is up, fasten your seatbelt.’
And a day later, Google banned my account for circumventing systems. No matter what I did I was unable to solve this issue and wasn’t willing to go down some rather shady ‘grey area’ paths to get a new account. Even if I did it seemed pointless as Big Tech is only getting smarter by the day and their algorithms even more savvy. A classic job proxy I believe MJ calls this…
November 2022 came and I had a series of calamitous nervous breakdowns and ended up becoming a severe alcoholic for 3 months straight (the effects of which I still feel to this day). I had never abused alcohol like that in my life. I was feeling suicidal several times.
I had given myself my word that by the time my 34th birthday arrived (which corresponded to working TEN years offshore) I would become liberated from the rat race, never have a boss again and split my time between several different countries in a location independent manner and finally start enjoying life without worrying every night about the great reset.
And then Google smashed my dreams with one fell swoop. Or rather I did by trying to run a 'job proxy' business.
To make matters worse, I had gotten very arrogant during the last ship job I had done and started standing up for myself in a way that even surprises me. Around the time of the google ads ban, I was alerted by my agent that the client had suspended me for ‘aggressive behaviour’ and a list of other accusations.
During the alcoholic period in that old man pub I had stationed myself at, I desperately tried 2 other ‘making money quick’ schemes pedalled by gurus who truly awoke me to the humbling reality of how the scammer economy online works.
I tried making a ‘brand ambassador’ blog using AI tools to write articles, and paying 300 bucks a month on SEO software etc. I think I made 60 bucks between then and now and according to google search console 75% of my 400+ articles are de-indexed. Despite the course owner saying there was a year long money-back guarantee, this turned out to be a lie and I was never refunded.
Finally, I tried this ‘email marketing’ program (or e-farming as the owner called it) where you build a list using solo ads traffic (basically traffic from other people’s lists) and sell garbage from clickbank, JVZoo and Warriorplus.
In a truly atrocious moment of greed and delusion I paid the e-farming guru 22.5k (most of the money I had left) to build the list for me with his ‘top quality hot leads.’
What followed was a torturous 3 months of combat with them where they refused to accept the reality that their traffic was utter rubbish that caused the autoresponder to have 0-1% open rates and get flooded by spam complaints. Luckily, I only lost 4k or so and got the rest back from them (though they framed it as them ‘making an exception for me’ which was hilarious).
Just as a side note, to illustrate just how insanely high I was on greed and selfishness over the past few years, I lost 45k playing crypto futures trading back in 2021 when the massive crash in May 2021 liquidated all my positions (nope I wasn't using stop losses).
Fast forward to today, I have been working at sea once again just to pay the bills and have a 5 figure sum of cash in my accounts. My net worth, while positive at least, is less than it was in 2020.
During this process I finally managed to kick the alcoholism for good (and nicotine which I acquired at sea).
Now I finally ‘get it.’
I listened to the audiobook ‘TFM’ offshore and later read the actual book once on dry land.
I then read Unscripted and am now finishing ‘The Great Rat-race Escape.’
Now I see precisely why I got my a$$ handed to me so brutally over the past 3-4 years.
I was doing literally everything wrong, and I didn’t even know it.
And I believe wholeheartedly I deserved it all.
I wasn’t doing this to make the world a better place. I wasn’t doing it to deliver genuine value to people’s lives.
It was all me, me me.
And I was punished for it. And deservedly so.
Now today I am not in the best of mental health. I am rather pessimistic about the future. I wrestle with a daily sense of nihilism and apathy.
But I am improving day by day. I am eating healthy food everyday, not drinking, took up boxing and hit the gym 6 days a week. I am also fortunate to have an amazing girlfriend and relationship which is worth its weight in gold.
I won’t hold back – while I have read the books and understand CENTS as well as the vast myriad of titbits MJ DeMarco has propagated through his teachings; I still feel paralysed.
I am struck down with fear, apathy and hopelessness. I am working on that of course, slowly but surely. I guess my biggest fear is simply failing again while having what feels like a very limited amount of time left.
In particularly, I am put off by the immense importance of using Big Tech for business success, specifically when it comes to soft and hard proofing potential products. I am trying to envisage a scenario where I am able to produce something of real value to give to the world without relying on Big Tech (Google and Facebook are no longer options for my use any longer).
Without Google or Facebook to test ideas during the proof stages of the execution procedure, I am not really sure what to do. But I am committed to finding a solution.
As per MJ’s list of instructions when I signed up here, I am going to proceed onto the next steps after reading the books which is to read the top viewed and gold threads. I will join the INSIDERS community as well. And I will choose a few of those recommended books from that pdf to delve into.
By hook or by crook, come hell or high-water I will succeed.
I refuse to believe I have nothing to offer humanity. That I can’t make the world a superior place compared to before I came along.
I don’t have a choice. I cannot justify starting a family with my girlfriend as long as I am anchored (see what I did there lol) to this ship job which isn’t even stable and probably won’t exist in 3 years where I’d only see my kids half the year.
Thank you for reading my story and hopefully some people learned something about greed and the importance of not drowning in it as a money chaser.
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