The Unemployed Millionaire (Book Review & Summary)

I purchased this book from Amazon.com last week, and it sat on my coffee table until today.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve picked up a book and read it all within a day, but that is what I did with The Unemployed Millionaire by Matt Morris (I started it at a coffee shop this morning and finished it at home tonight).  I think I liked it just as much as The 4-Hour Work Week.  If you are like me and don’t have any plans to “escape the rat race, fire your boss, and live life on YOUR terms”, this book can still help us all.  I took notes today and have posted them below in case you won’t have time to read the book.  If you do read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’d love to compare my notes with your own.  Since it is getting late I need to head to bed but wanted to share as soon as I could, so forgive any spelling or grammar errors as I am copying/pasting straight from my word processor.

• Introduction
  • When he turned four years old, his parents divorced. A year later, his father broke into their home and murdered my mother’s boyfriend by shooting him dead right in front of her. After serving his time in prison, he returned to severed alcoholism while my mom raised me, working two jobs with no child support and on food stamps at times, while working to finish her degree. When he was 13 years old, his father committed suicide. When he turned 18, he decided to become an entrepreneur and by 21, he was such a miserable failure I ended up $30,000 in debt, homeless, and living out of my little beat-up Honda Civic, bathing in gas station bathrooms.
• By age 21 he was a self-made millionaire. By age 32 he has generated well over $20,0000,0000 for his companies and feels like he is just getting started.
• The book starts with Morris in a college Marketing class. The professor, Dr. Nguyen, won’t let students go to the bathroom and if they do go to the bathroom they are considered “absent”. Additionally, for each class, he has assigned seating.
• The professor said the only way to really “make it” in business is to have a degree. The only way to be “great” at business is to have a master’s degree. The only way to really climb the corporate ladder is to get a PhD. Morris has a desire to work and not hear theories from professors who have never stepped foot in the business world, which leaves him to literally stand up and leave the Marketing class one day and never return to college.
• Started several businesses, all of them failing, which left him $30,000 in debt.
• Next worked for a pool company where customers would buy a $400 above ground pool or a more expensive “elite” version. The job paid him $200 per week salary plus commissions. This job afforded him just enough to get a $30 hotel room a week, and the rest of the time he was living out of his car.
• Would sleep in his car in church parking lots because he figured “criminals who might want to rob me (as if I had anything to take) might think twice doing it at a church”
• One night it was pouring rain, so he decided to take a bar of soap and try bathing in the rain. He says “if you’ve .ever showed in the rain, you’ve learned as I did that even when it’s raining really hard, it takes a long time to shower because there’s no concentration of water like there is from a shower head. I said to myself, this is going to take all night! Then my second stroke of genius hit me. Looking over at the church, which had no gutters, there was a huge concentration of runoff from the roof pouring down onto the asphalt. I walked myself under the runoff and had my shower! After getting back in my car and drying off, I did some serious soul-searching. I was 21 years old, homeless, sleeping in my car, lonely, over $30,000 in debt, and bathing in gas station bathrooms – I even showered naked in a public church parking lot because I stunk so bad. That was my wake-up call. I committed that night, even though I had no idea how, that I was going to turn my life around and become a huge success.”
• Listened to Tony Robbins audio cassettes in his car, and devoured hundreds of business and personal development books.
• “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” – Ben Franklin
• Tony Robbins says that we are all motivated by two primary forces: the desire to gain pleasure and the desire to avoid pain.
• Here is my take on having a job:
  • First, your boss is going to pay you just enough, so you don’t quit and hopefully, but not in most cases, just barely enough to motivate you to do well.
• Let me give you one warning, though. Be careful not to get caught in the cycle of mediocrity. What happens when you’re comfortable is that you end up getting deeper and deeper into a “good” life that prevents you from living a “great “ life and accomplishing what you really dream about.
• Learned “there is no such thing as security in having a job” after getting laid off from a software development company.
• Some calculations
  • 40 hours per week x 50 weeks per year x 40 years of your life = 80,000 hours
  • 1 hour a day commuting x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year x 40 years of your life = 10,000 hours
  • 90,000 hours spent working and commuting ÷ 5,840 waking hours in a year = over 15 years of your life wasted!
• In research done by Iowa State University that analyzed the effect Walmart has had on small business, researchers discovered that in a 10-year time frame, small towns alone lost more than 7,326 businesses because of competition. In this 10-year period, Iowa alone lost:
  • 555 grocery stores
  • 298 hardware stores
  • 293 building supply stores
  • 161 variety stores
  • 158 women’s apparel stores
  • 153 shoe stores
  • 116 drug stores
  • 111 men’s and boy’s apparel stores
• What will turn you into an Unemployed Millionaire is starting a business that fulfills the following criteria:
  • Doing something you love
  • Starting a business wherever you want to live
  • Starting a business that can run automatically
  • Starting a business, you can manage without physically being there
• According to the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, nearly one-third of lottery winners wind up bankrupt. They lose all of their money because of a lack of foundational knowledge on wealth and business.
• I firmly believe that if you took all of the world’s wealth and divided it equally among everyone, within 10 years those who were previously wealthy would again be wealthy. Those who were previously poor would again be poor.
• Far too many people live their lives with the belief that money is going to buy them happiness. Here’s what I’ve found to be true – money simply makes you more of what you already are.
• Most of us have gone to school for 12 to 20 years of our life to learn math, history, science, geography, and grammar, but we were never taught the most important subject of all – how to be successful. All the real life skills and principles that it takes to be successful are never taught in school. They are learned the hard way through trial and error, through failing in relationships, through failing in business, and through depression and desperation.
• Success is simple, but only if you know the formula.
• The major difference between successful people and the average person is that successful people believe in themselves, their abilities, and their faith so strongly that they know without a doubt that they’ll achieve their goals.
• The ONE and ONLY formula for success:
  • SUCCESS = Your Skill x Your Effort
  • (Your success is equal to your level of skill multiplied by your level of effort.)
• I’m here to tell you that whatever limiting beliefs you’ve created for yourself are absolute and total crap and are nothing more than a story you’ve made up about yourself.
• Look at the middle three letters of the word “beliefs” and you’ll see L-I-E – lie. What I suggest you accept is that any dis-empowering belief you have about yourself is nothing more than a life. It may be an opinion, but it’s never a fact.
• The most successful people in the world actually have more failures than the rest.
• Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, once said that if you want to greatly increase your chance of success, double your rate of failure.
• Celebrate your failures as successes.
• “Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, for it will become your destiny.” – Frank Outlaw
• You will never live life beyond your wildest expectations until you first have some wild expectations. – Author Unknown
• Dream big dreams that inspire you. If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not big enough.
• “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Lewis Carroll
• The key characteristics for achieving any goal are:
  • You must have a specific goal.
  • You must have a specific time frame to achieve your goal.
  • You must write your goal down.
  • You must determine a compelling purpose why you must achieve your goal.
  • You must develop an action plan to reach your goal.
  • You must think about and look at your goal every day.

• Simple Goal-Setting Sheet
  • Goal and Deadline
  • Purpose for Achieving Goal
  • Action Plan for Achieving Goal
• “Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.” – Margaret Bonnano
• Matt’s Action Management Strategy Summary
  • Allocate time every day (such as right before going to bed) where you plan the next day.)
  • Make a list of everything you want to get done the next day.
  • Prioritize your list into A, B, and C priorities
  • Arrange A, B, and C priorities in the order you want to complete them.
  • Define a time limit for each A and B priority. Add up the time to make sure you aren’t scheduling more than you could possibly complete in a day.
  • Set appointments in your schedule for accomplishing each A and b priority.
  • Schedule time to read and respond to e-mails.
• There’s a saying that in order to be a good leader, you must first be a good follower. The challenge with that statement is that most people stay in the follower role for so long that they develop what I call a “sheep” mentality. A follower who stays in the shadow of his or her leader for too long falls into a comfort zone of mediocrity. By never stepping out of your comfort zone, you never develop your own leadership abilities and also violate the most important principle of leadership. This principle states that people will generally not follow a leader who has a lower level of leadership than their own. If you’re a 7 on the leadership scale of 1 to 10, you typically won’t follow someone who’s below a 7.
• Leadership Laws
  • # 1 – The leader always has a dream larger than those he or she leads.
  • #2 – The leader always conveys an inspiring vision.
  • #3 – The leader always has a superior attitude than those he or she leads.
  • #4 – The leader sets the bar high.
• “To be blind is bad, but worse is to have eyes and not see.” – Helen Keller
• Use a different carrot
  • In business, far too many leaders use mere dollars as the carrot to motivate their people to action. What happens when you use money as the biggest motivator is that people will leave you in a second if they can earn more money somewhere else.
• The speed of the group is determined by the speed of the leader.
• “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Albert Schweitzer
• Matt today makes much of his money from his network marketing businesses
• You may have heard that the Chinese symbol for crisis is actually made up of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity. The wealthy in the world realize that during this economic “crisis” there is an even greater “opportunity” for those who choose their business endeavors wisely.