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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
M.J. DeMarco
Read between
July 18 - August 11, 2020
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
If I accept average advice from average people living average lives, can I expect to be anything but average?
If the people in your family or peer group are NOT happy and living a life you would like to lead, their life advice should be considered cautiously.
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.
Monday is an illusion. Sunday equals Thursday. The Earth is indifferent, with the exception of one creature: humans.
Hyper-personality is a person’s public image, a facade projected by fame or social media, a carefully crafted mirage that does not represent the real, humanized version of the individual.
As the SCRIPT’s newest manufactured M.O.D.E.L. Citizen, life is: (M)EDIOCRE: Life has regressed into an unremarkable yet comfortable ordinariness, where thriving is not an objective, but surviving. (O)BEDIENT: Free-thinking is dead; you follow popular opinion and trust your government and the news organizations fanning the flames of your biases. (D)EPENDENT: You’re a debt serf owned by an army of corporations: product and service producers, Wall Street, government—or worse, you are owned by time. (E)NTERTAINED: Your entertained and humored mind distracts the heart to the point where your soul
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The “fuck you” of liberty has five primary freedoms. They are: Freedom from work Freedom from scarcity and fiscal constraint Freedom from hyperrealistic influence Freedom from hope and dependence Freedom from ordinary and routine
I know the difference between the SCRIPTED seeking shortcuts and the UNSCRIPTED targeting those seeking shortcuts.
A true FTE shifts interest to commitment. It pummels excuses into submission.
You see, most people are “interested” in entrepreneurship, financial freedom, and success—but most never commit. Why? It just doesn’t hurt bad enough.
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.
I once tweeted that if you’re not willing to take a minimum-wage job, you’re not willing to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs can go weeks, sometimes months, without getting paid. Are you willing to make that sacrifice? If you aren’t willing to work for the minimum, how can you expect to work for nothing?
A response imbued with a true belief is actionable knowledge. A response compelled by a false belief manifests as a mistake, an illusion, or an inaction.
A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back to the crowd. ~ Max Lucado, Clergyman and Author
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. This systematic brainwashing is how mediocrity is born, lived, and then buried.
The shortcut scam is the idea that extraordinary results can be achieved by uncovering a secret bypass or a miracle weapon, and such can skirt the real hard work that actually creates the extraordinary results.
Action-faking (as opposed to “action-taking”) is when you take solitary and/or uncommitted action that is NOT a part of a bigger process.
In fact, anytime I hear someone say, “I’m on a diet,” I want to throat-punch them and shout, “Action-faker!” The word “diet” implies temporary. It implies failure. It implies that whatever you’re doing for three days or three weeks will NOT become habit or a part of your lifestyle. Diets die. Habits do not.
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.
Health can’t be shortcutted—bought, stolen, cheated, bribed, operated on—and it can’t be injected. It must be earned.
Success is simpler than you think: ax the shortcut, honor the process-principle, and do the necessary work.
The important thing here is to isolate the macro-process that builds the habit.
The hardest part of the process-principle is repetition; greatness is a lot of small things done daily.
The point is, whatever the goal, work until you strike your first echo.
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.
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.
Nearly 85 percent of all cars on the road are financed.
actual value and its delivery sometimes don’t match.
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.
The next three behavioral modifications are suggestions from Richard Wiseman, the experimental psychologist on luck. His experiments conclude our behavior can change luck if we mimic the traits associated with lucky people while eliminating the unlucky ones. These three traits are intuition, routine, and positivity.
An extraordinary life is won on offense; it is then preserved through defense.
Compound inflation is as powerful as compound interest.
In other words, if you want to get on the cover of Forbes, don’t take advice from Forbes.
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.
A Semmelwashing is the friction we face when other people discover we aren’t following the conventional SCRIPTED brainwash.
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.
Everyone wants the big bank account and the passive-income business, but few want the risk, the long hours, or the unpredictable income. Without sufficient WHYs, you’re no better than everyone, and “everyone” is not an echelon for aspiration. To be someone, you can’t be driven like everyone.
Don’t confuse a WHY with a DESIRE. DESIRES are often superficial and transient, whereas WHYS are firm and transcendent through time.
Saturated markets mean mediocrity and average products, and wonderland “do what you lovers” cannot survive unless they’re an outlier.
The feedback loop drives passion, which drives action, which drives results. See, it’s easy to love what you do when others do too.
Once you feel the positive results of your effort—feedback, sales, success stories, stray dogs saved, etc.—more passion is generated, which advances the entire motivation cycle.
Daily UNSCRIPTED pursuits are challenging and fraught with discomfort—expect passion to abandon you during the grind but return once the feedback loop fires.
shallow desires don’t compel sacrifice, whereas a committed purpose sacrifices everything. It borders obsession.
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.
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of well-being than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.
if advertising is needed to drive sales, sorry, you’ve got a product problem.
In a product-centered organization, advertising doesn’t float the boat; it steams the boat.
A productocracy has five core Commandments called CENTS. They are: The Commandment of Control The Commandment of Entry The Commandment of Need The Commandment of Time The Commandment of Scale
The CONTROL Commandment is not about absolutism but about risk mitigation and probability. You can violate CONTROL, defy the odds, and still succeed.
