Featured Interview With Peter Johnson
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I have always been driven to succeed and I am not sure why because it is not an aspiration that my parents had. I used to sell everything as a kid, I mean I sold my finger painting from pre school, One day my teacher broke a bow and arrow that i had made and so I hounded him that he broke it and so should pay for it, until he paid me the $3.5 i was asking. I found out years later that my dad, who was also a teacher at the school gave him the money.
When people asked what i wanted to do when i grow up, i said property tycoon or wealth business man but when i got to high school they were not in the careers guide books and nor was business entrepreneur? but priest was? So you can make a living out of renouncing money but not making it?
I was always good at communicating verbally and my child hood is filled with great adventures of selling this or that. One time I remember crying when i came home from school because they would not let me take home more than 15 boxes of chocolates to sell over the holidays. I did sell 46 boxes of chocolate that year for the school and single handedly won the class prize and a TV for the most personal sales. The next year i consigned $5000 dollars worth of chocolate in my own name to raise $2500 for the bible society of QLD and rode my bike sum 2000 km as part of the bike for bibles fund raiser.
I failed year 10 english and dropped out at the end of year 11 to go and work with my dad. Now I was not dumb, I just can’t read and no one bothered to teach me at school. I returned to school and repeated year 11 but this time i had the money to buy a computer from working for dad. So I did get good marks on assignments and passed year 12 english. Thanks to the VHS book reviews and the spell checker on my new computer.
But i had a problem, you see I really could not read at school and by the time I was in year 10 of my state funded day care and brain washing. I still could not read a page out of a book aloud and have anyone understand what i said!! I was so illiterate at 15 that I remember asking my mate why their was computer parking at the train station! He laughed and it was years before I found out that it was Commuter parking.
i have always had a passion and when i was 18yo i realized that i needed something more and the only place i might find it was in a book!.
The first book out of school that i read was think and grow rich, I forced myself through one page every night for the year that it took me to read it. That was 15min to read the page and 15 min to look up all the words in the dictionary. I still could not say most of the words but I read them in my head the same way and I knew what they meant. Now I still can not read aloud very well but I am very good at remembering what I have read. When you spend so much time reading something, you make sure you remember it.
At the same time i started my first business that got a contact promoting domino’s pizza stores in Brisbane. This business was a success and i decided then to take $200 a week of my turnover and spend it on my education. As it took so long to read a book i was careful which ones i started to read and i did a book review on each one. I also committed on faith to do at least one thing out of each book. Now because reading was so slow i went to a lot of seminars, at least 2 fee ones a week and some paid ones. If i did not have the money for the seminar i would sell something i owned or put it on my visa but i knew i had to get the information fast.
Thing were a bit slow when i was 23 and nothing big had happened yet, i had read the books but something was missing. I got one of the best financial planners in Brisbane to come a talk to me ($500 per hour, so I thought he would be good) and see if he could steer me in the right direction. Well the first thing he did was ask when I wanted to retire and i very quickly replied 25yo. As this had been my goal since 18yo and it was still looking doubtful which is why i had called him. He asked how old i was now and then proceeded to tell me that he could not make that plan for me and why! I did it anyway! and He never billed me for the lack of advise.
So by 23 i still had not done much i was onto my second business and sure it was the largest insulation contracting business in Brisbane but i still had not been able to buy a house?? and so had no wealth. Then i chanced on a seminar that showed me how to borrow and after that i brought my first house. Then i brought my second house at 24 and my 3rd 6months later and my 4th at 25yo. Now i had just made 1000 000 dollars in real-estate in 2 years, so i retired. Not from life but from working for money. People say why didn’t you keep making money but all i thought at the time was that my parents were retiring and they had less money than me, so that’s what I did!.
Now i used to think that anyone could do what i had done and so i would tell them what i did but after some of my best friends tried to do what i had done and failed i realized that my inability to read had become my strength Because i had just studied far more about real-estate then my friends did and so they kept doing things that i would not do and it was costing them money. After that the only advise i would give people is to take 10% of their current net worth and spend it on their wealth creation education. Then be a student and not a follower and take massive action!! on what you learn.
Since then i have done some fantastic things that most people only ever dream of and life has been fun. I have stopped making the big money and focused on more personal rewards within my family. Now even my boys have their own business and at 11 years old my oldest has $2000 capital that he manages and has dreams to retire like dad at 18yo, which i think he will do.
I have owned a double decker bus, 6 wheel drive, unimog 4×4 (in all i have owned 34 cars and 14 boats). I have lived on a sailing boat with the family for a year, I have a 40 foot power cat, plane and a rolex. I have been around the world, staying 5 star with the wife. The family has been on many trips over seas and many holidays in Australia including a 900Nm trip in our power cat up the coast of QLD. I have run many business interests including a safari company in cape york and I managed a national sales team on contract that was selling 500k of product a week.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I actually failed year 10 english and so you might think me to be an unlikely candidate to write books …. but since leaving school I have been investing in my education and now I have read more than 300 books and been to many seminars.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I am a slow reader and I read to get more out of life and so I do not have time to read fiction although I have a few ideas to write a fiction book.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I compare the current relationship between employer and employee to that of a slave mater and his slaves and assert that at least the slaves 200 years ago knew they were slaves.
I challenge what most people know that they know, about money! Because when all the poor people know that it is a fact, it should be a sure sign that its a lie or they would be rich.
I challenging the banks and the way they do business, I have stated that the way they calculate loan interest is wrong and even illegal. Banks normally don’t tell people about the real costs involved in a loan and in a lot of cases they lie. I would like to see a class action on this and say that in the book.
I also ask the question Why educate our kids to know more about maths than Archimedes or why they need to know more about science then tesla? Moral value is so much more important but we don’t teach that at school? and we almost teach nothing about money, or it’s use.
I also challenge the voting system in democratic countries as being manipulative at best and corrupt at worst.
I call everyone with a job and a mortgage my slave and try to give them tools to break the chains of that slavery
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