UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

Similar to a growth mindset, you understand choices are a powerful human endowment, capable of manipulating outcomes—and you’re not about to waste it. On the other hand, if you harbor an external locus of control, you marginalize choice and instead play “cards”: the race card, the victim card, the seasonal-depression card, or whatever other forty-nine cards are left in the deck. This aligns with a fixed mindset where you become victimized by weather forecasts, your crooked front teeth, your bad neighborhood, your public education, or whatever excuse-du-jour feeds the moment—all reasonable scapegoats for life’s sucky circumstances.

With an external locus of control, life happens TO you; YOU do not happen to life. The man is keeping you down. Personal responsibility, suffocated by entitlement. Whatever’s going on in your life, it’s always someone else’s fault. “Blame,” not “choice,” is the operative word. Yes, your business went bankrupt because of Obama, not because your website was last updated in 1998. Or maybe your business did a face-plant because of Google’s algorithm change, not because your product and the business model selling it sucks. And if you’re broke and couched in front of a TV? It’s because of those evil corporate oligarchs: big oil, big pharma, and heck, even big Jim, who’s your bookie.

Conversely, the pull in the push-pull polarity is a productocracy where products or services have gravity. Customers come to you. Each time the product/service is used, its gravity strengthens. The essence of a pull is word of mouth, social proof, and satisfied users.

When your product sucks and no one reorders, or most customers leave bad reviews, advertising is the only card you can play in the deck. And when the advertising stops, so do the sales, and so does the company. In this case, there is no fire, just the spark of marketing to push a substandard product into the hands of the deceived. Instead of selling actual value, push entrepreneurs are selling perceived value. At this point, you might think I hate advertising, sales, or marketing. Or that it’s unnecessary. It’s neither. In fact, sales, advertising, marketing, and copywriting are probably the most critical life skills you can have. My advertising rants aren’t to spurn its organizational imperatives but to demonstrate its relationship to the pull of a productocracy. In a product-centered organization, advertising doesn’t float the boat; it steams the boat.

So if you already have a business, how long would you survive if you stopped advertising? If the answer is weeks or months, you’ve got a product problem. And with a product problem, ultimately, you will have a business problem.

Entrepreneurship isn’t about nomadding in Thailand on a beach with an open laptop while drinking an umbrella drink. It's not about flashy cars and fistfuls of cash posted on Instagram, passive income, or a Forbes cover story. Entrepreneurship is about problem-solving, creating convenience, satisfying desires, and becoming valuable. You see, 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.

As Thomas Edison famously said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

Look up the word “value” in the dictionary; it reads relative worth, utility, or importance. The key phrase here is “relative worth” or “relative value.” The Commandment of Need’s central thesis is relative value, and it’s the keystone to becoming needed.

The richest people in the world are rich not because they create, control, or manage just value, but value relative to what already exists. Specifically, your blog full of fitness tips might indeed be valuable, but it isn’t relatively valuable—it is too ubiquitous when submerged into the global marketplace.

The importance of relativity could be seen in our fictitious city overburdened with restaurants: If you open a pizza bistro and there’s already twenty-five other pizza places nearby, have you provided relative value? Your pizza might be darn good, but relative value doesn’t exist because more than likely, a few other pizza joints are also darn good. Sand could be worthless or priceless depending on its rel...

The value skew pulls the Commandment of Need’s cart. Skew value clearly and overwhelmingly, and that cart fills with cash. The value skew is the force behind the pull of a productocracy. Companies that do not skew value do not satisfy the Commandment of Need, and they do not survive.

Once the communicated and perceived value (Buy $100 for $50!) turns into delivered value, sales will grow as word spreads. If communicated value isn’t delivered—hence, you over-promise—word also spreads, except in this case, sales do not grow.

So let's assume that the deal is legit. Now let’s assume that a new competing “money company” surfaces. They too are selling hundred-dollar bills for fifty bucks. Except this new company doesn’t require you to snail mail a check to some post office box: they offer immediate, online processing; you PayPal them fifty dollars, and wham, ten minutes later, your PayPal account is credited with a hundred dollars. Both companies are selling the same product with the exact same monetary value. But which company will grow faster and steeper? Obviously, the new company will outsell and outgrow the old company. They’ve dissected the value array and skewed value on two additional transactional attributes—faster processing and risk mitigation—while providing the exact same product.

Whenever a company grows exponentially, look no further than the value array and its attributes. How many of them have been skewed favorably? Exponential growth goes beyond just a cheap price; ...

The best opportunities rarely come from joining the crowd, but serving it.

There are three basic scale strategies, each with their own internal challenges. They are: A customer strategy A chain/franchise strategy A channel strategy

Too many people dream about the millionaire mountaintop, making them blind to the molehill in front of them. Like college, you didn’t take calculus until you passed trigonometry, which was after algebra. You can’t make millions if you don’t learn how to make hundreds. Scale is a process, not an event.

Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster. ~ David Olgilvy, Businessman

Brand building starts with identifying how you want your company to be perceived. If it was a person, who would be its friend? What does it stand for, and how will it conduct itself to reflect that persona? Don’t confuse a brand with your USP, or unique selling proposition. Being the cheapest or the service with the most features isn’t a brand. A USP is a part of the brand build like ties are to suits, but underneath the image there must be something more. Your customer must feel you are different.

For every disciplined effort, there is a multiple reward. ~ Jim Rohn, Author

Every action has a consequence, so always try to be good. ~ Richard Eyre, Director

Refocus your grind into the right system as opposed to the wrong system and it’s yours for the taking. I remind you: When I got started, there were plenty of people in this world who worked far harder than I did. I simply channeled my effort into a system where results could be unlimitedly leveraged versus limitedly capped.