The Value of Freedom is more valuable than all forms of currency combined.

[MJ DeMarco]

Thanks for the story Matt. It sounds incredibly promising. BTW, I edited your post (paragraphing) so more people would read it. It is well written.

BTW, you might find The Great Rat Race Escape to be a meter-mover as it has a full length story of a family who is in a similar situation to you: Full time jobs, daughter, growing family, unease with "scripted life" etc. You can read firsthand how the transformation takes place, from scripted drone, to financially free with no limits.

Welcome to the forum, hope to see you make something big on the aquarium filter -- I would be a customer!

I am writing this especially on this forum that @MJ DeMarco will probably not see.

Ha Ha, incorrect.

 

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[MMrazik]

Hi all. My name is Matt and I'm the founder of H2Aerotech (doesn't really mean anything yet but I know someday that brand will provide enough value to be sold). I took a different path to MJ DeMarco's books than I feel maybe most but I could be wrong. I'm relatively successful in the "Scripted" World. I make well over 6 figures a year. I can pretty much work my own schedule. I have an assistant who can run whatever daily tasks needed at the dealership I am enslaved too. I have literally accomplished all the goals I set out for myself coming out of high school.

I'm currently 28 and my peak annual income nearly reached 200k a year in 2019. (Not bad for never going to college and quite honestly I wasn't a great student in high school either) I have a Beautiful wife and daughter, Nice home, a couple of nice trucks, camper, ETC which I can easily afford by sacrificing my soul and time 50-60 hours a week to a garage. I have been mentally trained to put in the work, save for tomorrow and have been a cheapskate since the age of 18. I penny pinched... I used an app called "Mint" so religiously you would think it was my bible.

My entire goal in life was to make enough money to "live happy" and make enough so my wife can stay home and take care of our children. EVERYTHING was going according to plan until.... My daughter was born.

My daughter literally took my perception of life and what's important, chewed it up, spit it out and stomped on it repeatedly. What used to be easy for me now was becoming difficult (working 50-60 hours a week, solving every other persons problems, dealing with 100 employees who all report to me directly (pre assistant days). I'd leave in the morning before my daughter wakes up, and for awhile there I would get a max of an hour with her in the evening and sometimes no time at all. I soon realized I'm not happy at all. I'm actually miserable. This was almost a year ago at this point.

Instead of doing something about it I lied to myself. "I have worked so hard for everything I have there must be something wrong with my brain and soul and not my life or work"

This is where it gets interesting.

My mother in law and her husband have been working on a business of theirs for the last 10 years. Ultimately it went nowhere and they gave up on it. They had a basic proof of concept regarding filtering water, specifically in aquariums. They marketed it as the greatest thing since sliced bread and it flopped. Never sold a single "device". I helped them with social media and some other tasks a few years ago and then low and behold they give me their device in hopes I can make something of it.

I spent about 5 months after receiving this idea from my mother in law, staying up late, building, testing researching, re building, testing, making 3D printed prototypes, ETC... I took their basic design and completely stripped it down and rebuilt it from scratch in a way no one thought was possible (including myself, in laws and shit even the guy who originally came up with the concept in the 1970's said it wasn't possible) . I made this thing so simple that it could be used by my 2 year old daughter and holy shit.. it works. In fact it works so good I believe I can bring a shit ton of value to not only the aquarium world but to the entire world.

I'm still shocked that all of the remotes, TV's and electronics I took apart as a child actually gave me some sort of skill to stumble through this invention. Awesome story right? Actually it terrified me. I installed my filter device on a 55 gallon tank in my living room and also my daughters 10 gallon tank in her bedroom. It has a betta fish named "Bruce Blue Betta" (Ironically also has 3 B's) The tank for my daughter was set up a year ago now. My lazy a$$ hasn't even changed the water in this thing for a year but somehow the water is crystal clear, no smell and the fish are healthier than ever. I set up my LLC. I made a cool logo on adobe and I was all set to do something with it. Cool story bro right?

Nope. I didn't do shit after that. I went back to my scripted "comfortable" life and went on with life. Actually my dumbass doubled down on my scripted life. At least in my mind I did. Fast forward to a few weeks ago as of this writing I literally was starting to have a mental breakdown. I was spinning my tires in place, no longer progressing in my automotive career and I told myself my career has literally peaked at 28 year old. I feel most people would love to have my life so why was I so miserable that I was completely lost in my own mind and my anxiety was through the roof (actually resulting in several anxiety attacks). I continued to lie to myself about what was causing my anxiety.

I told myself I just need ways to cope or control it so I started reading books. Stress books. And they helped. I also read Jon Taffers Dont bullshit yourself too. I actually picked up the book in attempt to stop my excuses of wanting more out of life and focus on my career and stop being such a bitch.

Instead it did the opposite, it actually told me to stop creating excuses for myself to continue down the same miserable path I was on. I actually felt my soul start to come alive for the first time in years. I started to dust off the ol filter i built and asked myself well now what. Instead of excusing myself of it i started reading books on how to start a business. I read Ryan Morans "12 months to 1 million" which then led me to "Unscripted ". This may sound corny but I listened to unscripted through audible. I literally told my wife "Holy shit this guy who wrote this book literally sounds like me" i've never followed the beaten path my entire life.

Not in school, didn't go to college, never drank, smoked or did drugs with my idiot friends. I hate the media, I hate people who look for shortcuts and most of all I hate laziness and entitlement. I couldn't stop listening to this book. One day I listened to it for 6 hours. Someone finally told me what my inner self has always wanted.

Entrepreneurship.

Not because I want to make shit tons of money but because I'm literally not wired to follow the script. I had a conversation with my father about my plans to pursue creating my business with my water filter. His advice literally was to take the slow lane. Shit maybe even his advice could of been taken as the take sidewalk. ( He's spent 30 years building a RV storage lot and believes it takes that amount of time to build a successful business) I have a tremendous amount of love and respect for what my parents have built but his advise literally led me to have the biggest and scariest anxiety attack of my life that night.

I was up all night. Keep in mind I am still as of this writing making well over 6 figures in the automotive world but yes still had this massive anxiety attack. I guess i can refer to this as my "FTE". Since that night I have continued to read "Unscripted ". I have met with several patent lawyers and I have several contract manufacture meetings set up this week. I've made more progress in the last week furthering my life then I really have in my entire life. I didn't pick up "Unscripted " because I wanted a get rich scheme or a shortcut. I picked it up because I wanted to find some sort of direction on my water filter. I don't even know why I am writing this especially on this forum that @MJ DeMarco will probably not see.

Maybe I just wanted to say thank you for the direction and also to vent a little bit. Anyways I'm doing double time right now trying to build a business of my own while at the same time running someone else's pretty sizeable business during the day but i somehow feel no stress or anxiety about it. I think its because I have a purpose now. Get out of the scripted life bullshit, carve my own path and spend literally as much TIME as physically possible with my beautiful young family. Freedom is my goal. Not "Money" and I am going to accomplish that by bringing tremendous value to the world through filtering water. Anyways thanks for reading my rant whoever you are and thank you MJ for writing your books. They have pulled me out of a dark mental place. I look forward to continuing to learn as much as i possibly can about this path because honestly I feel pretty ignorant at times. -Matt.

 

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[MMrazik]

Holy shite Matt... do you know what paragraphs are? Haha

On a more serious level ...

That's a pretty interesting and (so far) impressive story there. Apart from being a bit hard to read, I'm really curious to see how your product invention will turn out. Seems like you had some mental fear blocks to overcome. So what pushed you over the edge to return back to your idea/invention? Was it the anxiety attacks or just all around feeling miserable?

I definitely think Ryan Moran is a great guy to follow if you are going down the product based business route. He even has an incubator program that might interest you.

A 200K salary would put you as one of the top earners, so of course you'd expect to live a good life (at least I would hope so, or you're doing something wrong). Many people who go down the FIRE path save aggressively in a high paying job and achieve financial freedom in maybe 10-15 years. Sounds like with your salary, and if you continued down that path, you would achieve that as well. So maybe the risk of making the leap to doing your own thing got to you?

I think in the end we are all chasing freedom and the unscripted life is one of the ways (not the only way -- see above) to achieve that. With a really good/high salary, good savings and investing, you can achieve freedom from a scripted life (just takes longer), but I think many of those types of people quit the rat race and end up with side hustle businesses anyways. And lastly, some people are simply happy to live a comfortable life with their steady paycheck. To each their own.

At the end of the day, you define what freedom means to you. That will be different for everyone.

Yeah it definitely turned more into a rant/vent than a well thought out and properly laid out piece of writing. Still don't know why I did that but I did feel better afterwards.

Between the complete misery of driving to the same place every morning, sitting behind the same desk and dealing with the same bullshit everyday was feeding into my anxiety. Am I just supposed to do this for the next 30 years? Combine that with knowing I can do more with life and my priorities in life changing. It just led me to look for something different. I've been pretty successful for my age. I almost feel like I had a mid life crisis prematurely.

I'm just different. Yeah I make a lot of money but I literally was a happier person when I made less and was more free. My FTE came from sacrificing all important things in life including time for that nice comfy 6 figure income.

Shoot when I ask myself what my goals are with this I don't even want to be filthy rich. I just want enough so I can live free and I truly deep down inside know I can accomplish this with this water filter if I can continue to get over the fear and mental blocks that were holding me back.

 

[Fiza Hanif]

Hi all. My name is Matt and I'm the founder of H2Aerotech (doesn't really mean anything yet but I know someday that brand will provide enough value to be sold). I took a different path to MJ DeMarco's books than I feel maybe most but I could be wrong. I'm relatively successful in the "Scripted" World. I make well over 6 figures a year. I can pretty much work my own schedule. I have an assistant who can run whatever daily tasks needed at the dealership I am enslaved too. I have literally accomplished all the goals I set out for myself coming out of high school.

I'm currently 28 and my peak annual income nearly reached 200k a year in 2019. (Not bad for never going to college and quite honestly I wasn't a great student in high school either) I have a Beautiful wife and daughter, Nice home, a couple of nice trucks, camper, ETC which I can easily afford by sacrificing my soul and time 50-60 hours a week to a garage. I have been mentally trained to put in the work, save for tomorrow and have been a cheapskate since the age of 18. I penny pinched... I used an app called "Mint" so religiously you would think it was my bible.

My entire goal in life was to make enough money to "live happy" and make enough so my wife can stay home and take care of our children. EVERYTHING was going according to plan until.... My daughter was born.

My daughter literally took my perception of life and what's important, chewed it up, spit it out and stomped on it repeatedly. What used to be easy for me now was becoming difficult (working 50-60 hours a week, solving every other persons problems, dealing with 100 employees who all report to me directly (pre assistant days). I'd leave in the morning before my daughter wakes up, and for awhile there I would get a max of an hour with her in the evening and sometimes no time at all. I soon realized I'm not happy at all. I'm actually miserable. This was almost a year ago at this point.

Instead of doing something about it I lied to myself. "I have worked so hard for everything I have there must be something wrong with my brain and soul and not my life or work"

This is where it gets interesting.

My mother in law and her husband have been working on a business of theirs for the last 10 years. Ultimately it went nowhere and they gave up on it. They had a basic proof of concept regarding filtering water, specifically in aquariums. They marketed it as the greatest thing since sliced bread and it flopped. Never sold a single "device". I helped them with social media and some other tasks a few years ago and then low and behold they give me their device in hopes I can make something of it.

I spent about 5 months after receiving this idea from my mother in law, staying up late, building, testing researching, re building, testing, making 3D printed prototypes, ETC... I took their basic design and completely stripped it down and rebuilt it from scratch in a way no one thought was possible (including myself, in laws and shit even the guy who originally came up with the concept in the 1970's said it wasn't possible) . I made this thing so simple that it could be used by my 2 year old daughter and holy shit.. it works. In fact it works so good I believe I can bring a shit ton of value to not only the aquarium world but to the entire world.

I'm still shocked that all of the remotes, TV's and electronics I took apart as a child actually gave me some sort of skill to stumble through this invention. Awesome story right? Actually it terrified me. I installed my filter device on a 55 gallon tank in my living room and also my daughters 10 gallon tank in her bedroom. It has a betta fish named "Bruce Blue Betta" (Ironically also has 3 B's) The tank for my daughter was set up a year ago now. My lazy a$$ hasn't even changed the water in this thing for a year but somehow the water is crystal clear, no smell and the fish are healthier than ever. I set up my LLC. I made a cool logo on adobe and I was all set to do something with it. Cool story bro right?

Nope. I didn't do shit after that. I went back to my scripted "comfortable" life and went on with life. Actually my dumbass doubled down on my scripted life. At least in my mind I did. Fast forward to a few weeks ago as of this writing I literally was starting to have a mental breakdown. I was spinning my tires in place, no longer progressing in my automotive career and I told myself my career has literally peaked at 28 year old. I feel most people would love to have my life so why was I so miserable that I was completely lost in my own mind and my anxiety was through the roof (actually resulting in several anxiety attacks). I continued to lie to myself about what was causing my anxiety.

I told myself I just need ways to cope or control it so I started reading books. Stress books. And they helped. I also read Jon Taffers Dont bullshit yourself too. I actually picked up the book in attempt to stop my excuses of wanting more out of life and focus on my career and stop being such a bitch.

Instead it did the opposite, it actually told me to stop creating excuses for myself to continue down the same miserable path I was on. I actually felt my soul start to come alive for the first time in years. I started to dust off the ol filter i built and asked myself well now what. Instead of excusing myself of it i started reading books on how to start a business. I read Ryan Morans "12 months to 1 million" which then led me to "Unscripted ". This may sound corny but I listened to unscripted through audible. I literally told my wife "Holy shit this guy who wrote this book literally sounds like me" i've never followed the beaten path my entire life.

Not in school, didn't go to college, never drank, smoked or did drugs with my idiot friends. I hate the media, I hate people who look for shortcuts and most of all I hate laziness and entitlement. I couldn't stop listening to this book. One day I listened to it for 6 hours. Someone finally told me what my inner self has always wanted.

Entrepreneurship.

Not because I want to make shit tons of money but because I'm literally not wired to follow the script. I had a conversation with my father about my plans to pursue creating my business with my water filter. His advice literally was to take the slow lane. Shit maybe even his advice could of been taken as the take sidewalk. ( He's spent 30 years building a RV storage lot and believes it takes that amount of time to build a successful business) I have a tremendous amount of love and respect for what my parents have built but his advise literally led me to have the biggest and scariest anxiety attack of my life that night.

I was up all night. Keep in mind I am still as of this writing making well over 6 figures in the automotive world but yes still had this massive anxiety attack. I guess i can refer to this as my "FTE". Since that night I have continued to read "Unscripted ". I have met with several patent lawyers and I have several contract manufacture meetings set up this week. I've made more progress in the last week furthering my life then I really have in my entire life. I didn't pick up "Unscripted " because I wanted a get rich scheme or a shortcut. I picked it up because I wanted to find some sort of direction on my water filter. I don't even know why I am writing this especially on this forum that @MJ DeMarco will probably not see.

Maybe I just wanted to say thank you for the direction and also to vent a little bit. Anyways I'm doing double time right now trying to build a business of my own while at the same time running someone else's pretty sizeable business during the day but i somehow feel no stress or anxiety about it. I think its because I have a purpose now. Get out of the scripted life bullshit, carve my own path and spend literally as much TIME as physically possible with my beautiful young family. Freedom is my goal. Not "Money" and I am going to accomplish that by bringing tremendous value to the world through filtering water. Anyways thanks for reading my rant whoever you are and thank you MJ for writing your books. They have pulled me out of a dark mental place. I look forward to continuing to learn as much as i possibly can about this path because honestly I feel pretty ignorant at times. -Matt.

Great story. Thank you for sharing this Matt! Wish you the best

 

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[davidpn]

Holy shite Matt... do you know what paragraphs are? Haha

On a more serious level ...

That's a pretty interesting and (so far) impressive story there. Apart from being a bit hard to read, I'm really curious to see how your product invention will turn out. Seems like you had some mental fear blocks to overcome. So what pushed you over the edge to return back to your idea/invention? Was it the anxiety attacks or just all around feeling miserable?

I definitely think Ryan Moran is a great guy to follow if you are going down the product based business route. He even has an incubator program that might interest you.

A 200K salary would put you as one of the top earners, so of course you'd expect to live a good life (at least I would hope so, or you're doing something wrong). Many people who go down the FIRE path save aggressively in a high paying job and achieve financial freedom in maybe 10-15 years. Sounds like with your salary, and if you continued down that path, you would achieve that as well. So maybe the risk of making the leap to doing your own thing got to you?

I think in the end we are all chasing freedom and the unscripted life is one of the ways (not the only way -- see above) to achieve that. With a really good/high salary, good savings and investing, you can achieve freedom from a scripted life (just takes longer), but I think many of those types of people quit the rat race and end up with side hustle businesses anyways. And lastly, some people are simply happy to live a comfortable life with their steady paycheck. To each their own.

At the end of the day, you define what freedom means to you. That will be different for everyone.

 

[Tiago]

Welcome to the forum. Great story!

 

[MMrazik]

Thanks for the story Matt. It sounds incredibly promising. BTW, I edited your post (paragraphing) so more people would read it. It is well written.

BTW, you might find The Great Rat Race Escape to be a meter-mover as it has a full length story of a family who is in a similar situation to you: Full time jobs, daughter, growing family, unease with "scripted life" etc. You can read firsthand how the transformation takes place, from scripted drone, to financially free with no limits.

Welcome to the forum, hope to see you make something big on the aquarium filter -- I would be a customer!



Ha Ha, incorrect.

Thank you for the response MJ. I read it as soon as you sent it 6 months ago and it gave me a shot of confidence to do this but I didn't want to waste anymore time on here talking about what I'm going to do. I've been pretty much living under a rock since I wrote that working on my own company. I logged back on for the first time since my rant here and re-read it for perspective. It's crazy to think how much has changed in my life in 6 months. It's been a challenging ride. We are launching a kickstarter campaign in the beginning of May and I'm so excited to launch our product.

Also, I have an appreciation for the time you took to respond because I did end up reading rat race (twice) since then and I definitely could relate. Looking back, I now can do the math on how much money you made by responding to my initial rant. Thanks for reading and thanks for writing your books. -Matt

 

[MMrazik]

It's been a year since my initial rant on here. Life continues to change a lot. We sell a decent amount of our clarifiers everyday. If we maintain our current pace it equals about $500,000 in revenue per year. We've only been "live" for 3 full months now and its almost like a dream that we are doing this much business already. Still learning everyday.

We are at a cross roads though. Our product is so unique, unknown and very powerful for home aquarium filtration. So much so we get hit with a lot of "snake oil", "gimmick" and an overall feeling from the aquarium industry that we are complete scam artist despite our customer reviews saying otherwise.

We met with a prominent figure in the home aquarium world today who echoed this "too good to be true" sounding technology and suggested we tone it down so its not so "abrasive" to the current industry infrastructure. He recommended we under promise and over deliver. The kicker is we already feel like we are already under promising because our clarifier does much more than what we market it for, but even that seems to be too much.

So my question to @MJ DeMarco or anyone else on this forum is:

Do I continue my trailblazing path and be on my own little island compared to the entire industry that can really squash me?

Or do I sell my product short even more to make it more "believable" to entice more buyers.


I'm leaning towards selling it short, selling more of them (hopefully) and just relying on customers to figure out that it does more than we say it does (even more so than we do already)

Anyways I got the aquarium worlds perspective on it earlier and hoping to get the business worlds perspective on here. I think I can put it together from there.