And I was unwinding.
You see, I’d been working at the South Carolina site for almost 24 hours – the white-collar version of a college all-nighter. The team I headed had been finalizing the startup of a facility known technically as a “continuous uranium de-nitrator.” The plant, built to prepare spent uranium for long-term storage, would be the first of its type in the United States.
For an engineer like me, it was a fascinating project to get to lead.
And a demanding one, too.
For months, team members and I had been running through a comprehensive startup checklist. The dangers of processing multiple deadly materials had been accounted for and controlled. Every switch, valve, and control loop was tested and retested.
But with a plant startup like this one, there’s a defining moment – a climax, if you will – when the rehearsals must end. Someone must push the button so that the facility’s live performances can begin.
That’s when you find out if all your hard work – and the care you put into the risk-reducing checks and rechecks – has paid off.
When you’re working with radioactive materials, as we were, those efforts, and this final moment, are critically important.
Here’s one example. Before the plant went live, we could actually work on the equipment wearing a minimum of protective gear. But once uranium entered the pipes, the system was “hot” – meaning it was actually radioactive. From that moment on, even simple tweaks to the system required us to don full protective gear.. and to use a much more elaborate safety plan.
For us, that first live performance had started before dawn on Palm Sunday in 1988.
I was the one who had the responsibility to push the button (hit the “Enter” key on the control system keyboard).
I can still see it all in my memory: circuits closed. Valves opened. Pumps started. The sophisticated chemical plant awoke from its startup slumber, came to life, and ran like the well-oiled machine we’d designed it to be.
Without a single hitch.
All of the startup team’s hard work, all of the systematic checks and rechecks paid off. By every metric, the project was a success.
We even brought it in on time and under budget.
It was quite an achievement.. and I was understandably proud of what our team had accomplished.
But hours later, as I’d perched atop that distillation tower and watched the light come up, I remember thinking – for the first time ever – that I wanted to be something other than a chemical engineer.
I was physically exhausted and mentally drained (100-hour work weeks will do that to you). I was 600 miles from my lovely and talented wife. And we hadn’t started our family (a biological impossibility when both spouses are in two different places).
With this project now receding in my professional rearview mirror, I realized that I was already thinking about the next phase of my career.. and my life.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that my high vantage point on that March morning gave me more than just a great view of daybreak.
It also allowed me to look into the future.. my future.. and the new professional course that ultimately led to this book.
I should tell you that by this point in my life I’d already been actively trading and investing in the financial markets for two years. I’d made some interesting discoveries. And I’d begun to understand the obstacles individual investors faced in their quest to trade effectively, safely, and profitably. (Take the area of information, for one example. I’d seen the paucity of data available to retail investors, and had seen that the little bit of information that was available was tough to understand – or just wrong.)
As an engineer, I’d spent years distilling sophisticated chemical processes into simple systems – with simple instructions – that anyone we hired and trained could follow. And I’d built in risk-management controls that let those same workers operate safely.
As I relaxed at the top of that tower that Sunday morning, I realized I could take that same simplicity, clarity, and safety and apply it to the complex and off-putting world of investing.
In other words, the same “keep-it-simple/keep-it-safe” approach that made it possible for a plant to churn out a stream of badly needed chemicals could also be used to create a system that would churn out a stream of profits, and wealth, for individual investors. And thanks to the easy-to-follow instructions – and attention to risk-minimization – the system in each of the two worlds (chemicals and investments) could be monitored and optimized in very small chunks of time.
The 10-Minute Millionaire is the result of that March 1988 epiphany.
After I climbed down from that distillation column, I spent the next 10 years straddling both worlds. I stayed with DuPont until 1999. I was the team leader and ultimate “push-the-button” guy for yet another startup, a project that also came off without a hitch – even though it posed even greater potential dangers and risks than the project I described earlier.
Having paid my dues on projects out in the field, I moved into a business-development role in a newly created DuPont-owned venture – an idea incubator designed to hatch new products, including cutting-edge fibers and composite materials.
However, even as I worked on these projects, I became more and more immersed in the investing world – learning from and trading alongside some great financial minds as I refined my own systematic approach to the financial markets.
By 1999, I was able to take early retirement from DuPont – and devote my full attention to trading and investing.
When doing something that you’re passionate about, time really does fly.
Since breaking out on my own, I’ve co-founded two different financial-seminar and trader-coaching companies. I co-authored the book Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom– a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller. I served as the risk-management and chief operating officer (COO) for a hedge fund. I also launched and ran three separate investing newsletters.
I’ve also done a fair bit of coaching, an activity that – believe it or not – really aided my quest to design a wealth-building trading system that is simple, fast, and safe.
In addition to those extracurricular pursuits, I’ve spent the better part of the last 16 years preparing lesson plans to help young people understand complex subjects.
For example, I’ve taught investing – stocks, bonds, and the financial markets – to elementary school students. I’ve also taught economics to kids in grades three through six to help them get ready for a statewide competition. (More than a dozen of the teams that I trained across all four of those grade levels have scored first-place finishes.)
Here, yet again, I saw how this ability to transform the most- sophisticated concepts into simple-to-follow systems led to pay dirt. Let’s face it, you can’t fudge “marginal utility,” “opportunity costs,” or “supply/demand equilibrium curves” to third graders. They either get it – and win ribbons – or they don’t.
I’m proud to say that the kids I’ve worked with – all of them wonderful – have managed to get it.
Helping investors get it is what The 10-Minute Millionaire is all about. The “it” here is our system – one designed to be a reliable and repeatable way to identify and profit from the stock market extremes that show up virtually every day. By using this system, you’ll have the opportunity to take a small, underperforming part of your portfolio and grow your trading account to a million dollars or more. And you’ll be able to do this with consistently small commitments of time.
I’ve broken this book into three sections, each with a specific goal – a format designed