UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

Behind any great story is a great change story led by a choice, which recirculates back to the process-principle.

Opportunity is served on the silver platter of change and change is ALWAYS happening.

If you miss one change—don't worry—another is coming.

Just as there are greedy rich people, there are greedy poor people.

Your perception is not the reality.

New successes blaze new roads; they don’t trail old ones.

we’re all unique based on countless variables: genetics, personalities, education, upbringing, experience, management style, leadership style, financial resources, network associates, and culture are just a few qualities that make cherry-picked strategy practically worthless.

Behind our reversing inability is a fear of loss.

And the longer it goes on, the harder the momentum is to break.

momentum paralysis keeps you chained to your past while wasting away your future.

because multiple failures precede success.

Our past decisions have deeply etched emotional attachments. And the greater those emotional attachments are—years of schooling, training, residency—the harder abandonment becomes, hence not choosing what’s best for the future but instead desiring to not see your past investment wasted.

Is it used to consume? Or is it used to maximize freedom within our free-range cage?

Money buys happiness when you let it buy your freedom.

Now imagine if your business relied on this company. Imagine giving this company your heart and soul for years, and that your family depended on them. And now, in a matter of days, gone. All because of ONE man and his ONE decision. Feel the burn? Hopefully, with the Commandment of Control in your corner, you won’t.

In my case, my prior four failed network-marketing forays (fortunately congested into a brief moment of insanity during my youth) paved the way to enlightenment: The only people getting rich with this horseshit were the owners/founders of the company. From there, I committed to swim as a shark and to stop schooling with the guppies.

Those who haven’t read my book learn the hard way—those who refuse to heed the advice end up in stories like these:

way trips with another business. Hitchhiking is when your business is symbiotically codependent with another vehicle owned and driven by someone else. And that “someone” cannot be trusted or controlled. Yeah, you’re at the mercy of a corporate stranger and his driving, his decisions, and his motives.

Diversification from influence means your product pulls from multiple channels; not just Amazon, but other channels including your website. Leveraging one channel as your business model is a risky walk of the tight rope.

The CONTROL Commandment is not about absolutism but about risk mitigation and probability. You can violate CONTROL, defy the odds, and still succeed.

If you’re taking risks and spending precious time to build a business, for the love of God, make sure your investment goes toward your brand and not someone else’s.

UNSCRIPTED empires are built on solid ground, not thin ice. If you think of your UNSCRIPTED journey as the construction of a building, the Commandment of Control represents the land you build upon.

At the end of the day, owning your own land, or being able to influence it, ensures that your business has longevity, mitigates catastrophic risk, and insures your work.

Take for example a company like Facebook, Airbnb, Alibaba, and Uber. None of these companies really owns anything, but instead, they control things. Facebook makes no content but controls it. Airbnb owns no real estate; Uber owns no cars; Alibaba owns no inventory—they all control it. As you can see, control does not always equate to ownership.

In the end, decide if you want to lead or follow. Direct or be directed. If it’s the former over the latter, congrats, you have the DNA to do great things. I mean, seriously, why do you want to be an entrepreneur? So someone can tell you what to do, what to sell, and how to sell it? Do you want to risk getting “black-slipped” for some unknown reason? When you violate the control, you essentially gag entrepreneurship with the mask of employment—someone in a gilded tower can fire you with one decision. That’s not entrepreneurship, that’s guppyism.

Tell God you want to be a shark.

If you wait for opportunities to occur, you will be one of the crowd.

As entry barriers to any business or start-up process weaken or become “easified,” so does the strength or the potential of the opportunity.

Simply put, the easier the opportunity, the worse it is.

Conversely, the harder something is to solve, the greate...

Anytime getting in business is as simple as filling out an online form or doing something so simple that a bum on a street corner can do it, the red flag of “easification” is flown.

easification appeals to entrepreneurs afflicted by the shortcut scam.

Entrepreneurship is about problem-solving, creating convenience, satisfying desires, and becoming valuable.

when you say, “I want to be an entrepreneur,” what you’re really saying is, “I want to be a lifetime problem-solver.” Those solved problems then translate into value for those who need their problem solved.

If you’re an entrepreneur scoping for ideas, the best are the hard ones because the difficulty represents the opportunity. When difficulty doesn’t exist and the Commandment of Entry looms, another red flag is hoisted: you aren’t solving any problems.

the difficulty is the opportunity.

There is no fucking list giving you the exact steps. There is no fucking list telling you what to do, how to do it, and where to do it. There is no fucking list that tells you who the best Chinese manufacturers are, and which products are the most profitable to import.

Crowds, simplicity, and easy access doesn't translate into opportunity because the opportunity has already been raped by the mob.

There is no fucking list and once you discover there isn’t one, be happy about it.