Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

WHAT IF LIFE WASN'T ABOUT DECADES OF WAGE-SLAVERY, PAYING BILLS, AND THEN DYING?

Today's contemporary slavery is an implied social contract whereas a gilded cage is exchanged for voluntary indebtedness and lifelong toil, a price sacrificed by a non-redeemable fifty-years of Monday through Friday, a willful servitude in which freedom is only promised by the dawn of life's fading twilight.-
MJ DeMarco



HAS AN INVISIBLE SCRIPT HIJACKED YOUR LIFE?
UNLOCK YOUR TRUTH. UNLEASH YOUR DREAM.

Tired of sleepwalking through a mediocre life bribed by mindless video-gaming, redemptive weekends, and a scant paycheck from a soul-suffocating job? Welcome to the SCRIPTED club-- where membership is neither perceived or consented.

The fact is, ever since you've been old enough to sit obediently in a classroom, you have been culturally engineered for servitude, unwittingly enslaved into a Machiavellian system where illusionary rules go unchallenged, sanctified traditions go unquestioned, and lifelong dreams go unfulfilled. As a result, your life is hijacked and marginalised into debt, despair, and dependence. Life's death sentence becomes the daily curse of the trivial and mundane. Fun fades. Dreams die. Don't let life's consolation prize become a car and a weekend.

Recapture what is yours and make a revolutionary repossession of life-and-liberty through the pursuit of entrepreneurship. A paradigm shift isn't needed--the damn paradigm needs to be thrown-out altogether.

The truth is, if you blindly follow conventional wisdom pushed by conventional people living conventional lives, can you expect to be anything but conventional? Rewrite life's script: ditch the job, give Wall Street the bird, and escape the insanity of trading your life away for a paycheck and an elderly promise called retirement.

UNSCRIPT today and start leading life-- instead of life leading you.

Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Self Help, Nonfiction, Finance, Money, Personal Development

432 pages, Paperback

First published May 23, 2017

About the author

MJ DeMarco is a semi-retired entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and international best-selling author who’s books have been translated in over 15 languages worldwide. He is the current founder of Viperion Publishing Corp., a media company focused on online and print content distribution. He also is admin/founder for The Fastlane Forum, the web’s leading destination forum for start-up, finance, and entrepreneurial business discussions.

Prior to embarking into the world of writing and authorship, he was the former start-up Founder/CEO of Limos.com (1997-2007), a global ground transportation aggregator and marketplace that he successfully built and grew into a profitable multi-million dollar company, all with no money, no formal training, and with just a few employees. In 2001, he sold the company in an exit event but later reacquired the company via bankruptcy reorganization. He later sold the company again in 2007 to a Phoenix-based private equity company.

By refusing to accept society's default template for mediocrity (THE SCRIPT: jobs, 401(k)s, frugality, give your life savings to Wall-Street) MJ was able to retire young in his thirties without sacrificing the good life. Yes, that means he isn’t playing Wall-Street's “hope, wait, and pray” game where you nervously invest all your savings into the stock market, all while commiserating over the Starbucks you couldn’t drink because saving $4.12 was more important. (Do people seriously believe that sh*t?)

Currently, MJ owns a publishing company which produces, distributes, and licenses his work around the world while contributing daily to TheFastlaneForum.com: an entrepreneurial community featuring over 40,000 entrepreneurs. He lives in Scottsdale Arizona and enjoys road trips, softball, travel, fitness and nutrition, working out, and recklessly exploring the Sonoran desert on his UTV.

Reviews

[Sergiy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one and "The Millionaire Fastlane" are probably the most influential books I have ever read. These two books are paradigm shifting, they will blow your mind. In fact, I liked Unscripted even more than TMF. There is so much to learn from here. Some content is repeated from TMF but it is more concise and accurate.
The main idea of the book is that in modern society "slavery still exists" but it has a different form than in the past. Now it is called the SCRIPT: have a nice school, get good marks, go to a right college, find a good job, work for 50 years climbing corporate ladder, get your 4%/year pay raise, invest 10% of your income into a retirement plan, retire at the age of 65, and have no time left to enjoy your freedom.
M.J. offers a new philosophy, a better way of thinking about your life strategy through the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship. He explores hyper realities that society lives in: named days, a college degree, entertainment, money.

You don't build wealth through compound interest, you build wealth by investing your money into automated business system. In order to create it, the author explains his Unscripted path:
1) Fuck this event - moment when you say "No more", moment when your "unscription" begins
2) Believes, biases and bullshit
3) Meaning and purpose
4) Fastlane Entrepreneurship
5) Kinetic Execution
6) The Four Disciplines
---------------
(2) Main takeaways:
- "Trust the Process" - don't seek events, establish the process to achieve your goal
- Consumption - be debt free, don't increase your spending in regards to increasing your income
- Luck - I really liked how M.J. substituted word "luck" with "probability". The more you are taking action, the higher chance you will succeed
- Controllable Unlimited Leverage (CUL) - your business VS Uncontrollable Limited Leverage - your job
-The compound interest scam - use compound interest to get income, not to create wealth

(3) Good explanation how motivation, passion and drive works. He calls it Feedback "Value" Loop. Provide value to other people through your actions. If the response is positive, it will reinforce you, and you are most likely gonna continue to do it, otherwise if the result is negative, your motivation through time will slowly decrease.
Another great idea, which I have partially experienced by myself: If you are paid for thing "that you love", eventually you will start to hate it.

(4) Create business system that serves market needs, not your ego. The ideal system should follow CENTS commandments, they are:
C-control - you must fully control your business, don't "hitchhike" with other businesses
E-entry - the higher barrier to get into the business, the better reward
N-need - don't follow "do what you love", instead find what are other people's problems and provide solutions (value)
T-time - don't trade your time for money, make your money create you more money
S-scale - get a high mass or magnitude of your products

(5) Make your idea a reality. Follow the path of creating your own product, while constantly taking feedback from the market.
Main takeaway:
- "Be faithfully monogamous" - don't launch a new business every 3 months, create something valuable and have a long term thinking

(6) Save all the money that your business is generating and invest it into money system. Diversify your portfolio to reduce risks. The more critical mass you have, the more monthly income it will provide. Reach the point where you don't need to work again.

------------------------------
This is an amazing book, if you are considering to read or not, I HIGHLY recommend it. The younger you are, the greater impact of this book will be. I'm glad I read this book in my early 20s. Now I see why my previous "dream" to become a software developer at Google/Microsoft is a dead end destination and why I will never have any freedom by following this path. Thank you M.J. for eye opening!

Favourite quotes:
"Well-dressed slaves are still slaves"
"To get millions, you have to impact millions"

[Janine Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all, if you’re listening to this on audio, skip forward to chapter 19- trust me, you’ll be glad you did! Basically MJ goes on a tireless rant about not being a slave to “the man”. Then he concludes that the only way to really make money is to be an entrepreneur- and that is where things actually become beneficial.

MJ is super cocky with a potty mouth. He starts the book saying how it’s long, but all important. It’s not. At least, definitely not the first 19 chapters. When you start to get into the meat of the book and glean some actual helpful information, I felt like I was already starting to loose steam.

So basically the book is only worth reading, in my opinion, if you start about a third of the way in. And even then, his style of writing was not for me. He strikes me as a man with a lot of monetary wealth and wisdom, but not a lot of substance or relationships.

[Nasos Psarrakos · Rating 5 out of 5]

MANADATORY!

[Mitch Tabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great follow-up to his first book: "The Millionaire Fastlane".

I didn't love the first few chapters. They mostly consisted of MJ bashing our current government systems, schools systems, and financial systems. Which I don't mind, but he bashed them into the ground, ran them over with a car, then found a plane and somehow crashed it into them. I found he went a little overboard - if you didn't get my analogy. But the rest of the book was amazing. Would definitely recommend.

I especially appreciated the sections where he talked about his preference for dividend paying investments. I didn't know a lot about investments at the time so his logic and explanations were helpful to me.

[ntoy · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/3rds of the book very repetitive and emotional writing, talking about how everyone is pretty much mentally disabled and living a horrific life that was forced upon them. Not really getting to the meat of anything, just keeps going on and on and repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating ...
Conflicting as he probably states 100 times that the most valuable asset is our time.
1/3rd of the book valuable points that could be summed up in 5 pages maximum.
Dissapointing.

[Jonas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite horrible. Author kept assuming the reader is borderline retarded. Had to quit about 25% in. Maybe its because I'm an entrepreneur myself and the 'scams' he talks about are incredibly obvious to me.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Absurd, entertaining, and somewhat informative, these all describe the book, but at different segments of the text. First, the book can be summarized as one-step "aggregated information product", those sorts of 100 page or fewer pdf people houk online, selling various things, mostly on pyramid schemes and/or online dating, but it doesn't quite feel like enough quality content to be compared to a professionally published book. Basically, a consolidation of information that could easily be gained from other books, sources, with little augmentation from the author, with a caveat.

The author does provide a lot of his own "content", given that this is a 17 hour listen, but what he does provide is a lot of fluff. Mostly berating "snowflakes" that don't want to work or studied liberal arts, which many people (including myself) have been guilty of doing in the past. But this author takes it to an entirely new level, many dozens of consecutive minutes of unhinged tirades against "snowflakes" (this is supposed to be a book about making money btw...). It really gets repetitive after the 3rd or 4th time, it has the quality of listening to an AM radio talk show in the car.

The author's main shtick is basically the following: To have an unscripted life, you have to find some product to sell, aggregate capital from those sales, and become a rentier off of investments you deploy with said capital after you've reached some threshold (a few million USD the author states). Also, the big insight this author makes that differentiates him with traditional wealth management/development material is that he understands that you can't build wealth through diversified investment vehicles alone.

Pretty much everything above should be obvious to anyone, who has even thought about doing some hustling, and the later should be obvious to anyone who knows how to use a logarithm and exponentiate. Most people aren't using these instruments to become a multimillionaire. But the author would probably suggest that more people should try.

The rationale to not leverage diversified portfolio in building wealth, but work on one's own product to sell on the side is that risk is not zero in the financial markets, so the true risk-adjusted returns of this sort of investment (like those balanced using modern portfolio theory) are close to 0%. Yet, the author doesn't really discuss the fact that deploying capital to develop your own product is also not risk-free, and may end up being riskier. Although this should not at all dissuade people from trying, especially the younger they are. it's just clear looking at anything exclusively from the risk side is not an adequate decision criterion on where one should invest their efforts in building wealth. Yet, the author doesn't really hammer out a clear "system" on this point, that is how to judge the benefits/cost interchange for some given opportunity.

The author does suggest some things that do make sense, mostly sprinkled throughout the 17 hours, but a lot of it could easily be gotten from other sources. I guess the book could be good motivational reading for some class of people, those starting out in brainstorming or to get them motivated to take the plunge into their own development. But the signal to noise for this book is highly skewed to the later, making it an inefficient use of time, even if you're passively reading it in the background. Just a meh

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author bases the book on his experience as a founder of Limo.com, a media company that focused on online and print content, and The Fastlane Forum, a website for entrepreneurship discussions. DeMarco explains how you can never get ahead by following the rules. He advocated for being unscripted by avoiding frauds, beliefs, and biases that pigeonhole people into acting a certain way. Three steps sum up the book, (1) create something, (2) maintain 100% ownership, and (3) sell access to others. Normally the repetition, verboseness, and lack of thesis support would only rate a two. However, he rates a three because DeMarco is practicing what he preaches. One, he created Unscripted. Two, he maintains 100% ownership and self-promotes his ideas a publishing company he owns. Three, he gets others to purchase the product.

Goodreads Giveaway randomly chose me to receive this book. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

[Angus · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm listening to the Audiobook, and 12% through.
The first 45 minutes was literally telling us
a) how good this book will eventually be (typically American style)
b) how much of a loser we are at the moment

Subsequent hour and a half is a right-wing rant against everything that he doesn't like: snowflakes, democrats, paying any tax, regulations, governments, Universities, Kim Kardasian, Beyonce, movies without total scientific accuracy, losers that 'follow the rules' (or pay tax).
I forget the rest, just the ranting of a dude who is clearly turning into another McAfee.

This guy is a delusional libertarian, and hasn't offered _any_ information in the first 2.5 hours.

Unbearable book. This is a rant; an arrogant manifesto of a man bizarrely lucky enough to become wealthy, despite his failings.

[Ahmed · Rating 1 out of 5]

DISAPPOINTED!

This book could have been a blog post.

The author spends way too much time ranting about how we've been preconditioned to a scripted lifestyle. He also keeps trying to sell you the book which makes no sense considering the reader is already reading it.

Not sure I learned anything from this entire book. I'm so pained that I bought it and had it shipped across the country. Ugh!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book full of sage advice, if you can get past the snarky tone.

[Mario Tomic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for entrepreneurs same as his previous book The Millionaire Fastlane.

[Michelle Bartlett · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t even finish this. Although it had some good insights and advice, I couldn’t stand that cocky douchebag persona only targeting hetero-alpha males. Not to mention the cringey and borderline misogynist examples whilst having to remind the audience how straight he is. I personally can find this same information from a much less negative author.

[Jh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Obnoxious and disgusting, as well as very contradictory.

I get that the author wants to put forth his message that you can never get wealthy by working. But his way of describing it is so abhorrent, that it seems like all he ever cares about is money? Like that is all that is to life. The idea is the same in all other millionaire self help books. First they try to sell you an abstract idea. Then, they tempt you to imagine the perfect lifestyle of riches while others slog at their 9 to 5 (imagine if everyone thinks like that, you live the rich and everyone else is below you). But here's the catch, he then later on preaches about delivering "value", not money. "He doesn't care for the money" etc etc.

Another contradictory stance. He argues for the positions of millionaires that saves by compound interests vs entrepreneurs that are millionaires. Saying that the former is being spotlighted much more in business times paper and being glorified etc. Talking about survivorship bias and how unlikely one becomes a millionaire by saving and investing. But MJ, which is actually rarer may I ask? Everything that he said can be used to describe entrepreneurs whom are millionaires themselves. It feels like he is insulting himself without even realising it, he really is the result of survivorship bias because there are also thousands of entrepreneurs that have failed so miserably without a fail save that they are literally homeless and surviving on breadcrumbs now. Pretty convenient to leave out all these details isn't it? These are only merely some examples in the book. Far and plenty more awaiting you if you ever pick up this one. It was so hard to read this book honestly.

And no, I'm not against entrepreneurs or one with a "scripted" mindset as MJ would say. It's just that some of the things he say are far too unrealistic and misleading that is really so repulsive for me.

1.5 stars overall because there were indeed some helpful and insightful tips in the book. That is if you can even get pass reading them.

P.S.: only read halfway while writing this, because it was too hard to continue on.

[Roland Tolnay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is for you if:
- you are curious on how the rich think about money
- you want to get into entrepreneurship but don’t know where to start
- you want to work on your own schedule
- you want to retire before age 50
- you are looking for ideas to start a business
- you already have a business and want to improve it
- you have the money, but you don’t know how to invest it, or you’re afraid of losing it

If any of the above describes you, and you were only allowed to read a single business book your entire life, well.. this is the one.
Entrepreneurship is not a profession: it’s a mindset, a lifestyle, and a choice you make every day.
It’s the ability to grow, take feedback and learn from it, adjust, and keep going relentlessly.
After reading Unscripted, you’ll realize that it’s quite simple, really.
Notice I said simple, not easy.
It’s definitely not easy and definitely not for everyone.
But if you think it might be for you, then Unscripted will give you a framework to follow, with the absolute best chance of success on your journey towards financial freedom.

[Andrei Savu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much of a rant. Too much of a n-steps framework. Too much of a religion with magic terms. The underlying philosophy is valid and very important and could be expressed in a book a fraction of the size.

[Alexej Gerstmaier · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Need to be really, really, really careful not to succumb to Action Faking, staying a “dream entrepreneur”!*
-Wait for years, never do anything. Caught in a perpetual paralysis by analysis, progress illusions, accomplishing nothing
-Fooling yourself about making progress, actions not directly correlated to what moves the needle.
-You don’t know what you need to know until you start executing.

->Need to make a habit out of making REAL PROGRESS, not Action faking. Constantly question whether what I’m doing might be action faking.

Execution is not “overanalysis, learning technologies, reading books”.
->poke the market
->learn by immediate objective in front of you: “research, learn, solve” (which is the ACT in act, assess, adjust)

-Crowded room myth (someones doing it), Empty room myth (nobody does it, must be impossible). Together these myths can rationalize doing nothing. Providing extra value (value skew) of any kind might be enough.
-difficulty=opportunity (Munger’s moat)

[Joel Valdez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a jewel. It is an unconventional entrepreneurship book that provides lots of insights and techniques from an author that "actually" did it. Practical, realistic, blunt. From changing your mindset and understanding of the system to tools to actually navigate once mindset change is accomplished. Content very thoughtful. Focus and time will be needed.

[Maher Kahlous · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wasn’t able to read beyond the 5th chapter.. the author is painfully annoying and the book is filled with fillers more like crappy self help like structured writing style.. it doesn’t take 3 chapters to know how awesome you are or how annoying working from 5 to 8 is. It’s like a self motivation youtube video but in writing.

[Cornelius Thien · Rating 5 out of 5]

A V12 engine strapped with quad turbos

Be prepared to have your face ripped off by the massive g-force. A neck brace is needed after the ride ends.

[Ken Hamner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not good enough to write a review.

[Mildred Brito · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is just a regurgitation of 20 different books.

[Oscar Pettersson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Är man redan såld på fördelarna med att vara egenföretagare kan man med FÖRDEL hoppa den första tredjedelen.

Boken innehåller mycket bra tips och råd, men är emellanåt onödigt utdragen.

Författaren framstår ibland också nästan överväldigande självgod, där måttstocken för att ha "lyckats" innefattar att ha många bilar och flera hus..

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was ok not great, I should have known better; generating a passive income stream early on in life and be free of living hand-to-mouth later on, freeing you up for the magisterially unique and exciting life you always dreamed of; what stings most is the total lack of societal responsibility, the duty we have to our fellows; those not in a position to enjoy such luxuries. For some more grounded works on how to go about living with some effectivity be sure to check out: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change and the works by Cal Newport; Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

[Konstantin Yegupov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh man, if you thought Tim Ferriss was obnoxious, wait till you read this.

The book promises that it is not like other "get rich quick" books, and then immediately proceeds to use all the same cliches from ANY OTHER "get rich quick" book. The raging, fightclubesque intro "y'all are cubicle slaves, sheeple" (which failed to resonate with me, because I was happy to avoid any loans in my life and have an interesting and well-paid job which I can easily change or even swap for freelancing), then the blurry but emotional speech about how only enterpreneurship can make you rich, free and happy (which also does not correlate with my observations, but eh let's believe that for a moment). A good third of the book is spent to fill you with rage, telling you stories about how evil capitalists exploit you; you'd expect a Marxist call to barricades by then - but no, the recipe is good old enterpreneurship.

Ok, MJ, so how do I strike that mother lode? How do I find that shiny business niche that provides me with "f-u money"? Of course there's no answer. You have to try and err yourself, buddy, and if you run out of money and end up in a ditch, well, at least you can be proud that you are not SCRIPTED!

But there's a lot of good execution advice in the middle. If you actually start your business, MJ highlights all the sensible things you should care about: market niche, customer relations, effective execution.

On top of that, there's some good advice about soul-searching techniques, including references to modern psychology discoveries. All in all, the book is full of common sense advice, which is, unfortunately, garnished by extreme pompousness of MJ's ego: there's an Annoyingly Alliterate name for every minor idea, and ocasionally a senior-astrologer-level diagram laying out these concepts for the convenience of the students. Maybe memorizing these memes will help you to write proper rants on MJ's forum!

Then there's a lot of controversy in the book. MJ seduces you with an image of expensive cars, then says expensive cars don't make you happy. He mocks "wage slaves" and then immediately refers to people who stayed employed but tripled their salary as "successes". He dismisses compound interest / Wall Street and then devotes a _whole chapter_ to an investment advice. He says the book is for aspiring enterpreneur, but he lays on a lot of advice on what to do with 5-10 millon dollars (umm I think I'd figure it out by then, wouldn't I?)

All in all, this book is an manipulative ego trip that occasionally drives past good common sense advice. I haven't found almost anything new or useful in the book, and I'm genuinely baffled to see a 4.5 rating - probably MJ is a good enterpreneur, and he knows how to push the buttons of his audience?..

[Kieran Smyth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Advice wrapped in bravado, or is it the other way around?

I'm going to pay the devil his due here; there is some really good advice in this book, particularly DeMarco's points around focusing on profit and creating value, listening and responding to the market, and avoiding common pitfalls. The big problem, however, is in the execution and the insufferable tone of the book.

The first hundred or so pages of the book is a rant that plays out philosophically somewhere between the movies The Matrix and Fight Club. Watch those movies and skip the first quarter of the book.

The remaining three quarters of the book are the real meat and potatoes of the book, but could really be edited down. DeMarco has a habit of taking way too long to get to the point and comes off as being rather mean-spirited towards people who don't share his worldview. He also coins terms for ideas that we already have the words to describe, which just makes things more confusing than they need to be.

This book could be improved tenfold by cutting the page count in half and losing the snarky tone.

TL;DR - Too long, too much bravado, and not a lot of new ideas. You can find the similar advice executed in a much better way in plenty of other books.

[David Rosage · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy this author and his out of the box thinking about how to create value and get ahead.

[Braga · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a wannabe-entrepreneur or an entrepreneur already or the average householder, you should definitely read this. Implementing some of these techniques is definitely challenging and the not everyone would be able to comprehend the ideas in this book, but I do not see any other better explanation available out there and it would stay so for a long time. To openly criticize America's No.1 Life coach on his book means, MJ does not give a f***. As my subjective opinion, MJ pushed me into entrepreneurship through his first book "The Millionaire Fastlane" and through this one, gave more insights and the discipline required to stay there. Putting together a framework that cannot be "frameworked" in such a candid way is a work of art, indeed. Overall a great read and a very much recommended one.

[Dušan Maďar · Rating 4 out of 5]

It repeats many of the points presented in TMFL, but dives deeper. Written in the same "in your face" fashion. Could be shorter (unnecessary repetitive fluff).

Some of the key approaches can be considered common sense (e.g. concentrate on value not on money, "act, assess, adjust", ...), but as common sense isn't that common, they are repeated throughout the book. I like the CENTS concept.

[Seth McCullough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's so refreshing to realize that there's people out there like the author MJ who share the same mindset of feeling as if something is definitely off with what is touted as "the American Dream". So many jobs I've held in the past played out the same exact way: excited to start and loved the new larger paycheck until the realization hit that in the end I'm just trading my most valuable resource, my time, for someone else's vision and aspirations. But look at these 401(k) benefits! Yes, that's awesome that you match a certain percentage of the money that I put in, but I can't use that money for over 40 years because the government says so - and they of course know what's best for me and my money. I love MJ's raw and straight to the point message of what he so eloquently terms "temporal prostitution". We're constantly told to live as frugal as possible and give as much income as we can to Wall Street with a hope and a prayer that the market, the people "managing" our money, and compound interest will bestow us with great returns. When in reality, their main focus is on the management fees they receive - which is directly correlated to how much WE invest. I'm truly astonished by how many times MJ blew my mind with these countless gems like this throughout the book.

Another factor that sets this book apart from the countless other books on entrepreneurship is MJ's mindset regarding money itself. He argues to completely remove the word "money" from your vocabulary and replace it with "value voucher". This is so obvious once it is realized, that money is literally just the perceived value that you bring to other people's lives. Acquiring money should never be the main focus in one's endeavors, creating value is second to none. In this day and age, so many "dreampreneurs" as MJ calls them are poisoned by the allure of money and search for the "silver bullet" in creating as much money as possible with the least amount of effort. Aside from winning the lottery or a large inheritance, the math just doesn't check out, the only way to create wealth is to put forth relentless work in creating genuine value for a large audience. As soon as genuine value is created and effectively communicated to customers, a "productocracy" is formed where people become "disciples" of your product and money has no choice but to follow. MJ argues that instead of thinking "how can I make a million dollars?" think "how can I affect the lives of a million people". Absolutely freaking love it.

Lastly, on a more personal note, I felt as if MJ was speaking directly to my soul as he laid out the path to true entrepreneurship. He explains that there comes a point in your life when you undergo an FTE or "F**k this event" that changes everything. It strikes your core and changes you from daydreaming about the life you wish to live into taking focused action towards your goals and aspirations in life. Over the past 8+ months since my FTE, I've come to realize that my life's purpose is to provide genuine value to the lives of others through my intense passion for technology. Although I'm currently in the "desert of desertion" stage of the Unscripted lifestyle (the time between an idea and the first customer, consisting of looong hours of unpaid work making the idea a reality) it is comforting to know that there are others out there who either have or are currently going through the same thing. I was so excited to find out that there is an online community of like-minded individuals and another book to read! Thank you MJ, this book has really opened my eyes and brought genuine value into my life.