📚The Book in 3 Bullets

• Time and mobility are now some of the most prized aspects of life. By having more time and mobility available, the ceiling for happiness and life satisfaction increases.

• The concept of working 9-5, 5 days a week is outdated and unnecessary. We have the ability to build systems that require less time and attention from us while generating income.

• Decreasing the amount of time spent commuting to work, being at work, and thinking about work gives us more time to pursue the things we want to do. Adopting a lifestyle that fosters freedom from the office can help us live the life that we want to live.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book has made me shift my view on my working life. It has been ingrained in our culture that working a good 9-5 job will allow us to make money that we can spend on accumulating more things. Well, to make money we don’t need to sell our time for money, we can set up a system that allows us to make money without being strapped down to a single job every day.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. — Mark Twain

• People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.

• An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. — Niels Bohr

• Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

• Most people choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

• The most important actions are never comfortable.

• Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away. — Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

• If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask.

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. — Henry David Thoreau

• It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains. — Thomas H. Huxley

• Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. — Anatole France

📖 Summary & Notes

• The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.

• Life doesn’t have to be so damn hard. It really doesn't. Most people have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep-it-short-or-get-fired vacation.

Step I: D is for Definition

• The New Rich want to prevent work for work’s sake and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect. They want to distribute recovery periods and adventures throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is. They want to be neither the boss nor the employee, but the owner. To own the trains and have someone else ensure they run on time.

• The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

• Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.

• Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.

• Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive.

• Focus on being productive instead of busy.

• Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

• Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

• Usually, what we fear most doing is what we need to do. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.

• Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction. If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in one year, five years, and ten years?

• There is less competition for bigger goals.

• Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.

• Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure.”

• What would you do if there were no way you could fail?

• What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?

• What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?

• Try to set 3-month and 6-month goals. Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now.

• To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

• There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.

Step II: E is for Elimination

• You shouldn’t be trying to do more each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type.

• What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

• Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.

• 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time. 80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers.

• More customers in not automatically more income. More customers is not the goal and often translates into 90% more housekeeping and a paltry 1-3% increase in income. Maximum income from minimal necessary effort is the primary goal.

• Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

• Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.

• Limit your tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).

• Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

• Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

• Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”

• Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.

• Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.

• Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

• People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.

• Replace the habit of “How are you?” with “How can I help you?” to make the other person get to the point and avoid unnecessary interruptions.

Step III: A is for Automation

• Becoming a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.

• It is absolutely necessary that you realize that you can always do something more cheaply yourself. This doesn’t mean you want to spend your time doing it. If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour; doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources.

• Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.

• The more competing resellers there are, the faster your product goes extinct.

• It is critical that you decide how you will sell and distribute your product before you commit to a product in the first place. The more middlemen are involved, the higher your margins must be to maintain profitability for all the links in the chain.

• Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.

• Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.

• It is more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small undefined fish in a big pond.

• Look creatively at your resume, work experience, physical habits, and hobbies and compile a list of all the groups, past and present, that you can associate yourself with. Look at products and books you own, including online and offline subscriptions, and ask yourself, “What groups of people purchase the same?”

• People can dislike you, but they should never misunderstand you. The main benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase.

• The product or service should cost the customer $50-200.

  • Higher pricing means that we can sell fewer units—and thus manage fewer customers—and fulfill our dreamlines.

  • Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers (better credit, fewer complaints/questions, fewer returns, etc.). It’s less headache.

  • Higher pricing creates higher profit margins. Aim for an 8-10x markup, which means a $100 product can’t cost you more than $10-12.50.

• Choose a product that you can fully explain in a good online FAQ.

• Create a product. Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.

• “Expert” in the context of selling a product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best—just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.

• What skills are you interested in that you—and others in your markets—would pay to learn? Become an expert in this skill for yourself and then create a product to teach the same.

• Intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and businesses will be profitable. Focus groups are equally misleading. To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy.

• Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.

• Our goal isn’t to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible.

• Contract outsourcing companies that specialize in one function vs. freelancers whenever possible so that if someone is fired, quits, or doesn’t perform, you can replace them without interrupting your business.

• Ensure that all outsourcers are willing to communicate among themselves to solve problems, and give them written permission to make the most inexpensive decisions without consulting you first.

• Phase I: 0-50 total units of product shipped

  • Do it all yourself. Put your phone number on the site for both general questions and order-taking and take customer calls to determine common questions that you will answer later in an online FAQ.

• Phase II: >10 units shipped per week

  • Add the extensive FAQ to your website and continue to add answers to common questions as received.

• Phase III: >20 units shipped per week

  • Optionally, set up an account with one of the call centers your new fulfillment center recommends.

  • Before signing on with a call center, get several 800 numbers they answer for current clients and make test calls, asking difficult product-related questions and gauging sales abilities. Call each number at least three times and note the make-or-break factor: wait time.

• Reduce the number of decisions your customers can or need to make. Here are a few methods:

  • Offer one or two purchase options (”basic” and “premium”) and no more.

  • Do not offer multiple shipping options. Offer one fast method instead and charge a premium.

  • Do not offer overnight or expedited shipping.

  • Do not offer international shipments.

• Those who spend the most complain the least.

• Don’t be the CEO or Founder. This screams start-up. Give yourself the mid-level title of “vice president (VP), or “director of sales.”

• Put various e-mail addresses on the “Contact Us” page for different departments, such as “human resources,” “sales,” “general inquiries,” “order status,” and so on. In the beginning, these will all be forwarded to your email address.

Step IV: L is for Liberation

• The New Rich are defined by a more elusive power than simple cash—unrestricted mobility.

• It’s too big a world to spend most of your life in a cubicle.

• Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons.

• If you jump ship or get fired, it isn’t hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily and live on savings for a brief period.

• Sell all the crap that you spent hundreds or thousands on and never use.

• The person who has more options has more power. Don’t wait until you need options to search for them.

• It takes two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.

• Here are some of Tim’s favorite starting points for traveling: Argentina (Buenos Aires, Cordoba), China (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei), Japan (Tokyo, Osaka), England (London), Ireland (Galway), Thailand (Bangkok, Chiang Mai), Germany (Berlin, Munich), Norway (Oslo), Australia (Sydney), New Zealand (Queenstown), Italy (Rome, Milan, Florence), Spain (Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla), and Holland (Amsterdam).

• Subtracting the bad does not create the good.

• Lacking an external focus the mind turns inward on itself and creates problems to solve, even if the problems are undefined or unimportant. If you find a focus, an ambitious goal that seems impossible and forces you to grow, these doubts disappear.

• If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.

• Surround yourself with smiling, positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work.

• Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.

• Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences.

• Income is renewable, but some other resources—like attention—are not.