UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

If you’re going to ignore the compound-interest scam and its capital-principle outlined in Chapter 25, please do so by investing in an activist fund where control is a part of the investment philosophy.

Here are just a few “business ventures” that stink of easification: Blogging/forums Self-publishing/writing T-shirt businesses Network marketing Affiliate marketing Selling on Amazon based on some Amazon guru course

Failed entrepreneurs fail for many reasons. One is they don’t understand entrepreneurship—what it is and what it is not. 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.

Here is just a sample list of value attributes that could frame your offer in the mind of your potential customer.

You see, your job is to identify every value attribute in the global pool, with the explicit intent to uncover skewing opportunities. The more attributes skewed without disrupting other skews (say price), the more sales you will win.

If there is value to skew, there is always room.

Here are opportunity's code words: I hate… This sucks… I’m tired… I wish… How frustrating… I don’t like… Why do I have to…? Why is this…[dangerous, unhealthy, hard,

Anything inconvenient is an opportunity.

Anything complicated which needs simplification is an opportunity.

Crappy customer service is an opportunity.

Geographical arbitrage, or changing the pond, is taking something common in your area and repositioning it to an area where there is an inadequate supply.

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

any publicly traded or heavily funded company exhibiting stakeholder demotion is ripe to have market share stolen by a smaller, nimble company.

Improve something, effectively communicate it, and you will be needed.

If you’re not getting out of the house and encountering life, you won’t encounter life’s problems.

Getting a job and being responsible is never failure. When you identify as an entrepreneur, a job is simply a means to an end, a part of your unfolding story.

Like seeds, legacy value creation requires cultivating before the seeds grow and sprout fruit. And when that fruit accumulates by the bushel, it’s transferred into a money system.

you’re playing in big EV ventures, it will take multiple failures before hitting something substantial.

Monogamy must precede polygamy. You have one business or none. You can be a world-class anything—but it requires an unrelenting focus.

You can’t dismiss working hard by saying you’ll work smarter. The UNSCRIPTED do both.

Once again, like many UNSCRIPTED tenets, the escape from conventional living is paved by doing the opposite of what conventional wisdom preaches. Great results come from great imbalances.

Decide what’s more important to you: permanent balanced mediocrity or temporary unbalanced exceptionalism?

For experts, branding is more: it is the art of personifying a business with human qualities and characteristics so that it reflects or affirms your own customer’s identity.

consequential-thought—the foresight into the consequences of our actions and knowing that our choices are unfairly weighted toward the bad ones.