UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

WHY are we indoctrinating our kids to follow the same path we’ve taken when that path has been a token failure?

anytime you allow a homogeneous group to write your thoughts, you slowly poison free thought.

Common 99 percent thinking won’t get you uncommon 1 percent results. Let the crowd do your thinking and you will indeed believe as the crowd and, unfortunately, find yourself with the results of the crowd.

eight belief dichotomies. Specifically, when the world thinks WHITE, you’re thinking BLACK. When the world is BUYING, you’re SELLING. It’s switching teams from the perennial loser, the 99 percent, to the perennial winner, the 1 percent.

Real, permanent change does NOT come from event idealism or from shortcuts. It comes from a daily, regimented process woven into the fabric of your life, automatic and nearly instinctual.

Intelligent Awareness Modify Expectations/Realign Difficulty Identify and Visualize the Change Target Apply Mathematics to the Goal Segment Goal into Its Daily Action Identify Threats to the Target Identify the Right Battlefield Attack Bad Habits with Inconvenience/Pain Act until Echo

After awareness, the next step is realigning expectations: extraordinary results demand extraordinary efforts. That means give up the ghost and kill the shortcut search.

Kill the idea that excellence can be accomplished with mediocre effort. The real difficulty is accepting there is no shortcut.

Success is simpler than you think: ax the shortcut, honor the process-principle, and do the necessary work.

Identify EXACTLY what you want to feel and see yourself there. If you don’t identify where you want to go, the road to get there stays hidden.

After isolating the goal and quantifying it, break it down into its core “take-action” component, or what I call “the daily target.”

you can attack your bad habits. How? By leveraging your natural human instinct to seek the path of least resistance. Put the shortcut scam in your corner by turning bad habits into a royal pain in the ass. Make them invasive. Inconvenient, and with no shortcuts.

The reality is, a fixed mindset is destroying our younger generation’s ability to cope. Whatever they call it, “self-esteem building” builds nothing and instead cripples dreams, creating fragile buttercups who can’t handle life's harsh realities.

Once they figure out that, nope, you’re not special because you showed up—you’re only special when you earn it—they’re crushed.

Do you accept your characteristics as facts, rigid constructs of existence, immovable and impervious to alteration? Or do you accept your weaknesses as malleable and open for improvement?

You see, you might not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but don't fret—you're surrounded by pencil sharpeners. The world is already yours, but only if you’re willing to go get it.

Have you done something today, no matter how small, to improve whatever needs improving? Are you moving the needle or action-faking? You are your only competition, and the process-principle will drive that change.

aim for mastery over performance: be the best at something YOU can be. It is 100 percent YOU-oriented and not centered on performance or competitive rankings. Mastery doesn’t care about how you are judged by others. It’s only about “getting better” (you) over “being better” (others).

No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.

Throughout the years, we badger our parents for toys and other playful things. Underneath these innocent desires an unfortunate neural connection builds: the idea that “stuff” can induce positive emotions without consequence. And because our parents pay the tab, such mental connections carry a destructive payload: consumption and production are not correlated.

You lead the herd, not follow it. You pave new paths, not harden the already well-worn ones. You create and sell franchises, not buy them. You receive rents or royalties, not pay them. You lend, not borrow. You create and sell a brand; you’re not buying the brand. You hire employees, not seek to be hired as one. You sell products on late-night infomercials; you’re not buying them. You sell on Black Friday, not buying on Black Friday.

money is just a transaction mediator where agreed perceived value is stored.

Money’s velocity is only predicated on perceived value, not actual value.

Most people are broke and remain broke because the money scam has made them perpetual chasers of something that cannot be chased—it can only be attracted by offering perceived value.

If you want to make millions, impact millions.

INSIGHT(S) TO CONSIDER… 1 - How we manage our selfishness determines if we operate our business within the gray area of value-cheating or the sunny skies of value-providing. 2 - Your relationship with money is defined by one of the three monetary identities: 1) money-chasing, 2) value-cheating, or 3) value-vouchering. Which is it?

Bad luck? No way. You choose the interpretation of your life events and then you choose how to act on that interpretation.

INSIGHT(S) TO CONSIDER… Unlike money, luck has no brain and holds no grudges or prejudices. It only reacts to the mathematical probabilities of an applied stimulus. QUESTION(S) TO PONDER… In your life today, what behaviors, actions, or inactions are crippling probabilities and muzzling your luck?

the frugality scam—the belief that obsessive expense reduction, penny-pinching, and experiential deprivation will someday pay off in the opposite: rich life experiences, freedom, and abundance.

Stop eating out, stop going to movies, stop going on expensive vacations, stop this, and stop that. That is, you SCRIPTED fool, stop living and start dying. Live poor so you can die rich.

You can’t become a teenage millionaire by perfectly timing an S&P 500 investment at age 12. Get rich quick might indeed exist, but don’t mistake that for get rich easy.

The compound-interest scam is this serendipitous orthodoxy that the stock market will someday make you, the common man, uncommonly rich.

If financial freedom and autonomy are your goals, your beliefs must align with those goals. If they don’t, you’ll either (A) lie to yourself, or (B) sabotage your effort, causing tension and stress. Both make goals unobtainable.

Whatever the rationale, it compels unchanging and continuing displeasing momentum. And the longer it goes on, the harder the momentum is to break. And then the excuse becomes, “But we’ve been together for twelve years!” The cognitive machinations behind momentum paralysis is a sunk-cost fallacy.

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.

unfortunately, will probably be for life. When you identify as an entrepreneur, you will do whatever it takes to quit your job and succeed as one because your identity seeks congruence.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of entrepreneurship live and die in your head—reversing beliefs, unbinding biases, and confronting bullshit. An autopiloted brain, which isn’t trained to think how it thinks, will find their UNSCRIPTED effort likened to an hour at the casino—short and not sweet. Entrepreneurship is a tough but rewarding sport. But it must be lived, not tried.

I am an author, entrepreneur, and an investor. How do you currently identify yourself? Unemployed college grad? Car salesman? And does it serve your goals?

There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.

Great results require a great commitment. Commitment fires the process-principle where habits become lifestyle and lifestyle becomes winning results.

I can attribute my early business failures to these two mantras. I followed my interests and passions while ignoring market needs and marketable value propositions. From vitamins to automotive audio, everything I tried never offered or communicated unique value to the marketplace. Need, nonexistent. Passion didn’t pay the bills because passion didn’t hit a market need.

Oh, you like to snowboard, so you’re going to build a snowboard business? Your passion is NOT a reason to go into business. I lost eight months and made ZERO sales attempting to “follow my passion” when I knew nothing about how to add value in this particular market.64

Should I start a fitness blog?” “Do I start a car social network?” When I probe further, “What value are you offering” or “What are you doing different that hasn’t been beaten to death elsewhere?” the answer is always the same: nothing. For the lost, “do what you love” and “follow your passion” are suddenly a business model impervious to market economics.

when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person’s intrinsic motivation to perform a task. The overall effect of offering a reward for a previously unrewarded activity is a shift to extrinsic motivation and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation. Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.65

So, if you’re doing something freely because you’re passionate about it, suddenly getting paid for it might poison that passion. I see failed passionites report this frequently, including my own experience. I started chauffeuring because I loved to drive. By the time I finished that job, I hated driving. Fast-forward twenty years and guess what? I still hate driving. “Do what you love” can kill your love.

Don’t “do what you love,” because even if you are lucky to make a living doing it, you won’t love it for very long. You should love the value you create. The process is hard, but it’s justified by your love of the value that is created through it.

The final reason why “do what you love” and “follow your passion” are crummy advice is perhaps the most potent and destructive: they’re Trojan horses into a fixed mindset, a justification to avoid pain and discomfort, and hence, inhibit growth.

the secret to success isn’t “do what you love” but “do what you hate.” How much pain and anxiety you’ll endure tells me how much success you’re willing to achieve. You see, passion doesn’t move me to do podcasts or live radio interviews. And passion certainly doesn’t put me on stage in front of an audience for two hours—meaning-and-purpose gets me there.

You see, the mechanism underneath Jobs’s statement is neither love nor passion for specific work, but having love and passion for the positive RESULTS of your work.

Passion is self-replicating and greases the entire system. Your positive impact generates passion. Don’t be passionate about what needs to be done; be passionate about what you WILL BECOME. Be passionate about your vision as it compels doing whatever it takes. Passion focused on specific activities does not. In the end, passion isn’t something you follow; it’s something that ebbs and flows with your effort.