UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

While Fastlane unmasked the myths of wealth, it really hinted at something more: an esoteric reality hidden in the fabric of society; a cultural underbelly threading something insidiously deceptive—a sociological scheme sentencing your life to an existence of blind obedience, resigned mediocrity, and abandoned dreams.

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. ~ Dresden James, Author

Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught HOW to think, while millions have been taught WHAT to think? ~ Peter Hitchens, Journalist and Author

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. ~ Dresden James, Author

In high school and throughout college, the SCRIPTED worldview targets its primary nemesis: critical thinking. Instead of exposing our kids to free thought, educational institutions are now full-fledged indoctrination camps pushing ideological agendas from ideological administrators.

The university system, once an intellectual crossroad for ideas, is now the largest confirmation bias on the planet, where mass cast opinions are sheathed in “safe spaces” as undebatable truths.

Similarly, a Rhode Island middle school pushed the mediocrity mandate by trying to cancel their traditional honors night because rewarding students who do well is “exclusive.” After an uproar from some parents, they backtracked. One of those parents rhetorically asked a local reporter, “How else are they supposed to learn coping skills, not just based on success but relative failure?”

Once your brain is exposed to the secrets behind a magician’s tricks, the appearance of magic disappears. As does the magician’s power to deceive.

For every creature on Earth, named days don’t exist. Your dog Rex doesn’t know the difference between a Sunday and a Tuesday, other than you might spend more time with him on Sunday. His Sunday *feels* exactly the same as a Monday.

The mathematics are real; named days are not. In other words, the entire scheme is an artificial interval to institute order.

Consumerism is the myth that consumption can produce success or happiness. Despite that Vogue magazine, despite that Audi commercial, despite that banner ad, you are not what you own, but you can be owned by what you own.

Megacorporations spend trillions annually to create consumer hyperrealities—or in marketing speak, “brands”—all designed to communicate a fabricated perception. BRAND X says you’re wealthy, BRAND Y says you’re fashionable, and BRAND Z says you’re rugged.

The “college degree” hyperreality is two-pronged. First, it is the stale idea that intelligence and financial wealth require a college degree, regardless of cost, and more so, a life without one is forever underscored by underemployment and underachievement.

But guess what? If there are no businesses and no entrepreneurs—society’s redheaded whipping boys—there will be no jobs. Such an oxymoronic position is akin to loving babies but hating mothers.

Again, the reality is different from the hyperrealistic version. A college degree doesn’t produce jobs out of thin air. It entitles you to NOTHING. I repeat, NOTHING.

And in many cases like my girls-night story, the expression of the hyper-self becomes more important than the true self.

Virtual reality is a captivating and addictive simulation of an alternate reality exploiting a series of enticement heuristics: competition, goal achievement, faux improvement, and positive feedback loops.

Like, if confiscating 100 percent of your economic output constitutes slavery, at which point does it cease to be slavery? 80 percent? 50 percent? 39.6 percent?

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

Always needing to work and always loathing the obligation, Sidewalkers routinely waste time in superfluous hyperrealistic proxies: sports, television dramas, Internet comment wars. You see, the Sidewalker doesn’t play the game of life; he spectates. He comments. He opines. He heckles the million-dollar athlete from the cheap seats.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. ~ Ayn Rand, Author

Give a man an OK job that pays just enough to provide mediocre comfort and I’ll show you a man that will keep his job indefinitely. This is by design.

In 1926, in an interview published by World’s Work magazine, industrial titan Henry Ford confesses why he reduced his workers’ labor load from six days and forty-eight hours to five days and forty hours, all while keeping pay the same. He said: It is the influence of leisure on consumption which makes the [five day workweek] so necessary. The people who consume the bulk of goods are the people who make them. That is a fact we must never forget, that is the secret of our prosperity.

My point is this: Responsibility necessitates consumption. Stack extemporaneous responsibility into life and consumption is mandated. And the SCRIPT loves consumption.

Your mind is understatedly powerful. In fact, I owe three orthopedic surgeries to this amazing power. By using visualization at the gym, I ably lifted staggering weight that guys twice my size couldn’t lift. My brain’s visualizations made these heavy lifts possible; however, after years of defying my small frame, my joints finally said, “No freaking more.”

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back to the crowd. ~ Max Lucado, Clergyman and Author

Give up the assumptions about those who accomplish great things and that their results are automatically Deus Ex Machina, not process.

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

In essence, money bridged and stored our perceived value assessments between two vastly different items:

Let’s say that during our sales negotiations, you represented the sculpture to be pure gold. After paying $50,000, I later discover the sculpture is not gold but bronze covered in cheap electroplate. I feel scammed. Why? Because you misrepresented value. Perceived value did not translate into actual value.

Lost in the money hunt is money’s true nature. And it’s something few talk about. Money is stored perceived value intangibly accounted, value that you have created, acquired, and communicated.

Money doesn’t have a brain but its possessors do. Therefore money responds indirectly to a value stimulus, but it also can hold biases and prejudices.

Stop hunting money and start hunting value. Money is not prey. Instead, erase “money” from your vocabulary. Vow to never utter the word again. As a producer, start thinking of “money” as value-vouchers—a store of perceived value produced, communicated, and delivered to the world.

To HONORABLY attract value-vouchers, money bridges must be constructed with these four building blocks: 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)

For the UNSCRIPTED, perceived value and actual value match. And yes, marketing and copywriting are absolutely critical in the value chain. However, for capitalist villains, slick marketing steals wealth through value illusions, much like Mr. Lustig did decades ago.

Put customers as kings in the stakeholder chain, being trustworthy and honorable to a standard that squashes the villain narrative. A fiduciary mindset is selfless, where an external exploration of needs and problems becomes clear.

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?

What if you had TEN chances to correctly call one coin flip to win the ten million? Would you keep flipping? Or stop and reason, “Eh, I’m just not lucky.” You see, moving probability is about trying. Hitting heads on one coin flip is 50 percent, but ten flips moves the probability to 99.4 percent. That means, just because no one shared or commented on the great blog article you wrote doesn’t mean the game ends. Just because your invention didn’t get funding or the 2Gs blown on Facebook ads sold nothing, doesn’t mean dig your grave. Keep freaking flipping!

Within the UNSCRIPTED 3(B)s, our objective is to change your gumball machine’s contents. A Slowlane or Sidewalk existence cranks for mostly everything but gold. If life’s best-case scenario is a 2 percent pay raise, well, enjoy the celebration dinner at Red Lobster. The fact is, many people work harder than I do—the problem isn’t their work ethic; it’s their gumball machine. An UNSCRIPTED pursuit modifies this universe: reds disappear and golds sneak in.

Behind the “get rich quick” stories you’ll discover two critical items: 1) A strong offense underscored by controllable unlimited leverage (CUL) and 2) a detachment from intrinsic value (trading your time for money) in lieu of a business system.

The second element which makes “get rich quick” possible is clipping the strings of “time for money” or intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is the value of your time in a job endeavor. If you stock shelves at Target, your intrinsic value might be rated hourly at $12. If you’re a doctor, it might be rated annually at $200,000. No matter which, income is capped and measuredly limited by the number of hours in a day, or years in a life. Creating massive wealth quickly requires this relationship to disintegrate.

In the race to win your freedom, an offensive stallion wins—not a defensive mule.

In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made a legendary discovery in the field of medicine and obstetrics. He unconventionally proposed that washing your hands with a chlorinated lime solution would drastically reduce child-born fever, a common illness of the day. Think his peers showered him with rewards and accolades? Unfortunately not. Because Dr. Semmelweis’s discovery conflicted with conventional medical knowledge, the mainstream medical community blasted his claim, rejecting it as bunk and hooey. While some dismissed the discovery (and the data) based on scientific reasoning, others spurned it because it was unconscionable to presume that an upper-class gentleman, a physician, would have untidy and unclean hands. Despite ridicule from his peers, Dr. Semmelweis stood convicted to his discovery for years. By opposing the consensus, eventually his colleagues branded him a whack job and banished him from practice. In 1865, Dr. Semmelweis was committed to an insane asylum where he’d die just weeks later, purportedly at the hands of asylum guards. While his committal circumstances were never verified (perhaps having your life’s work disparaged?), his death went relatively unnoticed, if not celebrated by those who contemptibly viewed his discovery.

This renaissance story demonstrates the next bias you’ll face on your UNSCRIPTED path: Semmelwashing. However, Semmelwashing doesn’t come from your mind; it comes from the hive mind of the mainstream. It’s what happens when unconventional crashes into conventional. When traditional paradigms are opposed or questioned, not only is the message attacked but so is the messenger. A Semmelwashing is the friction we face when other people discover we aren’t following the conventional SCRIPTED brainwash.

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

Another injurious effect stemming from the dynamic duo of bad advice is opportunity compression. Opportunity compression limits your exposure to new opportunities in alternative industries that are ripe for new value offerings. For example, if you’re passionate only about sewing and scuba diving, you will compress your available opportunities to those industries only. If those industries represent only .00002 percent of GDP, you limit yourself to that small pool of opportunity. Don’t microscope yourself into a puddle when you should be surveying the ocean.

This explains why a gazillion blogs are abandoned after two or three articles. Think those people would quit if their first blog post had a million views, 500 comments, and 12,000 shares? The feedback loop drives passion, which drives action, which drives results. See, it’s easy to love what you do when others do too.

Again, like the spirited smiling, pay attention to how you feel the moment you accomplish the value challenge. You should feel good, maybe even a rush of excitement. This same feeling happens in entrepreneurship once your feedback loop transforms into a value loop. I call the experience “entrepreneurial heroine.” And once you feel it, there’s no going back.

The great happiness secret is autonomy. Freedom. The ability to feel in control of your life, to stockpile options, mobility, and whatever else you self-determine and endorse. Remember my UNSCRIPTED moment outside the Bank of America when I realized I didn’t need a job for at least a year? It was one of the happiest moments in my life because it gave me autonomy. You see, anyone who tells you that money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it correctly. Money buys autonomy, or it buys a down payment on debt and anti-autonomy. I shit you not. Autonomy is so influential it could cause you to love life poor and hate it rich.

Basically, intrinsic improvement and growth (competence), freedom (autonomy), and family (relatedness) are core constituents of happiness.