UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

greatness is a lot of small things done daily.

The process-principle and its echoes can be visualized as a line of dominoes, where each sequential domino gets progressively larger. When you start, the very first domino knocked over is incredibly small. When it drops, nothing is felt or heard. However, its velocity is enough to knock over the next, slightly larger domino. That domino continues the progression, toppling the next larger one. As the dominoes get bigger and fall, suddenly you start hearing and feeling them drop. It’s music to your ears, motivating you forward. The process continues until the last domino tumbles over, a gigantic domino symbolizing your goal—competing in a fitness competition, saving a million bucks, getting out of debt—and it started with a tiny, insignificant domino, which cascaded into incredible change velocity. And yet, the ascending dominoes perfectly illustrate why event-driven failures fail: They start at the biggest domino and are powerless to budge it. If they only saw that it’s the little things that cause the big things.

To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential. ~ Bruce Lee,

The special scam is a double-edged belief that our innate talents are enough to accomplish our dreams—OR that our innate talents are immovable, fixed characteristics immune from improvement.

Underneath the special scam lies the greatest destructive force to our dreams: a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is the belief that talent alone causes success and that your basic qualities of intelligence, athleticism, and even rhythm are fixed traits that cannot be changed or improved.

Once you become aware that neuroplasticity—your brain’s ability to form new neural connections—is possible, intelligence and skill no longer await just the victors of the genetic lottery.

The Kaizen Principle is to endeavor to create tiny incremental improvements in your daily life with an aim for mastery over performance, while forsaking external comparisons, unless such comparisons inspire. The three key operands here are: 1) Tiny incremental improvements 2) mastery over performance and 3) external comparison.

Comparison is the path to perpetual misery.

Never praise talent or ability, either for yourself or for a child. Instead, praise the process-principle. Praise improvements, habits, growth, and efforts. Praise how far you’ve come, and one day, you’ll praise your results.

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

Debt, spending more than you earn, is consumption exceeding production.

Debt mandates the necessity of future work—even if you cannot find work.

Lottery winners and athletes who overspend and go broke is symptomatic to the underlying problem which is a SCRIPTED mindset anchored by CONSUMPTION.

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.

Effective producerism rarely evolves from trading your time for money, but instead manifests itself from investing your time into a scalable business system.

To consume richly—nice homes, luxury cars, world travel— you (and your business system) will need to equally produce as richly, if not more.

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. ~ Albert Einstein,

it can only be attracted by offering perceived value.

In effect, your net worth scoreboards how much perceived value you’ve created, communicated, and sold beyond your consumption of it. Billionaires (or their heirs) have been privy to a massive value operation. And the actual paper? That’s our universal agreement to transform the intangible number into the tangible. Throw in some fancy paper, ink, and dead presidents, and voilà, money!

Value (product/service creation) Perceived value communicated to another party (marketing and messaging) A mutual agreement, an equilibrium with that party (closing) Actual value delivered (execution)

That truth is this: Everything great in society has happened because money moved massively due to massive value creation and delivery—and yes, this created rich people. Without wealth, you’d be transported back to the dark ages, where you’d shit in an outhouse, burn candles for light, and use pigeons to send letters to your nana in Akron. Money doesn’t escape your wallet because there’s a gun to your head (unless it’s the gun of the government); you buy because you perceive value, enough of it that it compels you to say, “Yes, here’s my cash; give me what you have.”

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?

Untested probability means “good luck” avoids you.

Unlike money, luck has no brain and holds no grudges or prejudices. It only reacts to the mathematical probabilities of an applied stimulus.

Truth doesn’t keep SCRIPTED slaves enslaved.

Subtract the entrepreneurs, the inheritors, the sports and entertainment titans, the corporate insiders, and those that serve the financial industry over investing in it, and you’ll find exactly what I found: the stock market isn’t making investors wealthy; it’s making its servants wealthy.

Failure is normally temporary and can be remedied by trying again. A compound-interest failure is permanent because its attempt spans decades. Trying again is impossible.

If your wealth strategy is compound interest, what uncontrollable variables are lagging and endangering your retirement? Market returns? Savings rate? Job stability? The economy? Life expectancy? Inflation?

Change keeps you poor or makes you rich. You decide which.

The point is, our brain seeks confirmation that we’re right, often without considering if we really are. And the idea of confirming our rightness feels awfully good. You see, you’d rather be right than rich.

Your perception is not the reality.

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

“Only a bit,” the Mexican replied. “Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked. “I have enough to support my family’s immediate needs,” the Mexican said. “But,” the American then asked, “what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, take evening strolls to the village, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.” The American scoffed, “I have a Harvard MBA, and I could help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, you buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you could sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control everything. You would need to leave your small village and move to the big city to manage your expanding enterprise.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied, “Ten to fifteen years.” “But what then, señor?” The American laughed and said, “Well, that’s the best part. When the time is right, you would sell your company and become very rich; you would make millions.” “Millions, señor? Then what?” The American said slowly, “Then you would retire, move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, play with your kids, t...

Money buys happiness when you let it buy your freedom.

Socratic questioning drills into mental roadblocks. It probes assumptions and demands evidence.

The cancer corollary is a hypothetical syllogism that exposes cerebral bullshit and eradicates it. Used willfully, it kills paper crutches and dartboarded excuses. Anytime your cerebral dogma mouths off and argues you’re too young, too old, too poor, too this, and too that, the cancer corollary breaks the pattern.

when someone has what you desperately want or need, their backstory becomes irrelevant.

You see, when your identity shifts from what you WANT TO BE to WHAT YOU ARE, your actions will fight to maintain the identity.

Willpower and motivation have been proven ineffective as depleting resources. They rarely work at creating habits, the agents of permanent change. Real change comes from identity and self—not from interim motivations jump-started by books or YouTube binging. Basically, you have to BE what you want to become FIRST so the actions can follow. Don’t TALK about it; BE about it. BE. ACT on being. Then HAVE.

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. –Napoleon Hill,

When passion doesn’t solve people’s problems, passion doesn’t pay bills.

Passion didn’t pay the bills because passion didn’t hit a market need.

In a series of tweets, Andreessen posited: TWEET #1: “Do what you love” / “follow your passion” is dangerous and destructive career advice. 67 Andreessen then tweeted a few more times about the survivor bias and how “do what you love” failures have no platform. And then he dropped this golden nugget: TWEET #5: Better career advice may be “do what contributes” -- focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one’s own ego.68

When no one values our value, passion quits us.

The feedback loop drives passion, which drives action, which drives results.

Passion flows when effort is rewarded.

Man cannot live without some knowledge of the purpose of life. If he can find no purpose in life, he creates one in the inevitability of death. ~ Chester Himes, Writer

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poet

perceived value is the only requirement of a money exchange, not actual value.

Perceived value hustlers are interested in having the best marketing, the best copy, and the best sales funnels—not the best product.